In reference to my post the other day about the New Black Panther Party member who was arrested for wearing body armor and carrying a revolver in New York City, Jay made a good point:  Whether or not it is just or unconstitutional, the law is the law, and when we break the law, knowingly or unknowingly, we have to be prepared to pay the consequences.  I have to agree.

But I do have some follow-up questions:

Do we, as people who value our rights and the rights of others, have an obligation to follow an unjust or unconstitutional law?  If we are willing to take the consequences for breaking such a law, are we wrong to break it?  From another angle, are we bound by duty and honor to break them in order to bring attention to the injustice?

My opinion, and remember, I’m just a schlub from North Dakota, is that we have a duty to bring attention to unjust laws, up to and including inviting our own arrest in order to bring them down.  Martin Luther King went to jail for breaking an unjust law, and history is rife with people who broke laws for the sake of breaking them in order to bring them down.   Of course, when we get caught breaking them, as Jay pointed out, we have to be willing to face the consequences for our actions.  Even if we are breaking the laws on purpose, we have to be willing to chance decades in jail.  No “It’s not fair!” or “I didn’t know!” defenses should come from our side.

I know, I know, put up or shut up, DaddyBear.  I’m not at the point of being ready to put a gun in a holster and walk into a bar in Chicago, mainly because the mechanisms for changing their onerous gun laws are grinding their slow justice.  But if those mechanisms should fail, one of the more honorable ways that we can fight these laws is through civil disobedience and by supporting those ensnared by them, even if they knowingly broke the law.  In the extreme, we can become the ‘test case’ that is used to bring injustice before the courts.

Now, Shabazz isn’t exactly Rosa Parks, and I doubt that civil rights lawyers are leaping at the chance to take his case through the judicial system.  But a case like his will eventually come along, where someone with an exemplary record is picked up because she chose to put a gun in her purse rather than a rape whistle when she went to the Navy Pier, or who used a gun to defend his family in Brooklyn rather than cower and wait for the police.  Will we, even acknowledging that they willfully broke the law, support them?

I’d love to hear your responses. This one has me puzzling and muttering to myself.