To The Editor:
Civil disobedience generally involves openly breaking laws and accepting the penalty for so-doing (as opposed to criminal disobedience, which is surreptitious, is not in pursuit of any redress of grievances and seeks to avoid penalties). One prominent example is Henry David Thoreau spending the night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax for the Mexican American War. Another is the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, NC, and elsewhere seeking racial integration of public facilities during the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. In both cases the participants broke laws they considered to be unjust (not necessarily always the case) and willingly accepted arrest and imprisonment in an effort to stand up for their beliefs, to express their desire to change the law and to move the hearts and minds of others.
Secretly removing prayer flags and accepting no public responsibility isn’t truly an act of civil disobedience. While it may technically violate some vandalism statute, the people who did it (however outraged and justified they may have felt) were not protesting vandalism laws, they chose to be anonymous, and they accepted no responsibility for their actions, and hence, they were not, strictly speaking, committing civil disobedience.
Theoretically, we all have the right to pray in our own way and we bear a certain risk when we invite people to do so publicly. People may take it upon themselves to impede or deny expression of certain prayers, but let’s not call it civil disobedience, shall we? And let’s also try to remember that, at least for the time being, we still have the right to be wrong in the good old U.S.
Paul Hanke
Warren
