Boston Tea Party, Parental Rights and Disobedience

On this 16th Day of December 1773, Patriots and rabble rousers in the New England Colonies stood together in disobedience that famously forced a reassessment of society's moral parameters that would spark the creation of this great nation, and change the course of world civiliization.

When we consider our duty to Civil Disobedience, it hinges on a distinction between an "unjust law" and an "illegitimate government." Plato suggested those who broke an unjust law had to accept punishment as part of the bargain. However, when an entire government is illegitimate and unjust, preserving public order, and acceptance of punishment, need not apply to civil disobedience.

John Locke, an elightened inspiration of the first American Revolution, said that force may be used to oppose even the highest magistrates if they themselves are lawbreakers:

"Wherever law ends, tyranny begins [...] and whoever in authority exceeds the power given to him by the law, and makes use of the force he has under his command [...] upon the subject which the law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate, and acting without authority, may be opposed as any other man who by force invades the right of another. And why this should not hold in the highest, as well as in the most inferior magistrate, I would gladly be informed." "May the commands then of a prince be opposed? [...] Force is to be opposed to nothing but to unjust and unlawful force.
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"Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs [...] many wrong and inconvenient laws will born by the people without mutiny [...] But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves.
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Is this not the distinction between a lawful government having unjust laws and an illegitimate government? More recent scholarship has upheld this distinction between civil disobedience and what could be called "militant" action:

"Civil disobedience [...] is clearly distinct from militant action [...] the militant does not accept [the existing political system] as one which is nearly just or reasonably so, he believes [...] that it departs widely from its professed principles [...] While his action is conscientious in its own terms, he does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power). Instead he seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption or resistance [...] to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to avoid the penalty [...] [since this would] express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which he is opposed. [...] Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified.
" [1] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Consider the government edict: "The Reichsgericht itself refused to recognize Jews living in Germany as persons in the legal sense" Supreme Court of Germany (1936), per Ernst Fraenkel, German legal scholar. Now consider how the family courts routinely and arbitrarily pick and chose one parent to have 'legal rights' as a parent. Hitler's rise to power was completely legal [2], but many consider the Nazi government illegitimate because the Nazi's denied legal protection to entire classes of human beings. In this regard there no moral distinction between their policies and our own government's policy toward non-custodial parents. Do parents engaging in civil disobedience owe a duty of self-surrender to such a government? The answer must be no.

If there be Patriots about, Please take time to comemorate the Boston Tea Party on this December 16.

Fred Schuler
www.f4jfl.com