*Originally posted by Scylla *
It seems to me that right and wrong, are increasingly being replaced by legal, and illegal.
The two groups of concepts (right/wrong, legal/illegal) are difficult to compare. Right and wrong are most often moral or cultural concepts espoused by groups whereas legal and illegal are documented criteria. An action, for example, may be considered “wrong” yet can legal.
So much of life is like this. Rules are set up to provide justice and protection, and only the letter is followed. Nobody uses discretion. Nobody recognizes that the rules exist to provide justice, not to circumvent it. Nobody is willing to stick there neck out for the right thing, we just blindly follow the legal thing.
The parties involved may talk about justice and protection, but rules are really set up by one group in a position of power to enforce a desired form of behavior upon another group. I agree, there is a strong difference between “justice” and the strict interpretation of the law. Too frequently, true justice gets the short end of the stick.
[B}It makes me think of the terms Outlaw and Vigilante.**
Vigilante is probably one of the most mis-understood terms from the Old West. Today it is used to mean an individual who “takes the law into his own hands”, in effect circumventing the established legal system to meet out his own form of jsutice. This is not the actual historical vigilante. In the Old West, Committees of Vigilance (or such) were generally set up by the members of a community in cases where no system of justice existed. In most cases, they operated with the support of the community, maintained a form of law and order, and disbanded when a formal legal system was established.
On much of the American frontier, “the law” in the form of sherrifs, judges, jails, etc. was a latecomer to the scene. An isolated community sometimes had no other option but to set up its own system for maintaining order. To go back further in history, the concepts of the “posse comitatus” and the “hue and cry”, where every able bodied man was expected to join in the pursuit and had some responsibility for the general welfare come from England before a stable system of law enforcement existed.
If the rules are wrong. Are we obligated to break them?
If the rules are wrong from a point of view of common morality, common welfare, certainly. We are obligated to break them from the perspective of that point of view. For example, the case of Rosa Parks refusing to take her seat at the back of the bus is a case of breaking the law from a perspective that racial discrimination is morally wrong.
As an interesting side point, it is also written in the Declaration of Independence (I believe, don’t have my copy in front of me) something to the effect that when a government becomes tyrannical it is the right of the people to replace it.
How can we argue them in the courts and the commitees when it was those same courts and commitees that set them up?
We can’t, in court. That’s why lawyer’s wives wear mink coats and my wife wears a cloth one. In other venues, however, the average person still has a voice, and has an obligation to use that voice to express his/her opinion. Write letters - to the newspaper, your representatives, to the President if you wish. Speak out at your local school board meetings. Join and support organizations that work to support your point of view. Be an INFORMED voter. As Frederick Douglass advised: “Agitate, agitate, agitate”.
Consider that bugaboo of the modern liberal: the oft maligned gun lobby. We hear story after story about how powerful the lobby is and how tough it is to take them on. The reason it’s effective and powerful is because it is a grass-roots movement of people who are vocal about their rights. Money has nothing to do with it. The monetary contributions of the AMA, the pharmecutical industry, the defense industry and a score of others dwarf the minscule amount from the “gun lobby”.