Peaceful Civil Disobedience

I believe peaceful resistance to laws positively impacts a free society. As citizens of the United States, we are born with certain natural rights. According to John Locke, an eighteenth century philosopher, natural rights are not bestowed by the government, but inherited by birth by virtue of the fact that we are human beings. These natural rights include life, liberty, and property. He theorized that the purpose of government was to protect those rights; and if it did not, it would lose its legitimacy and need not be obeyed.

Peaceful civil disobedience can be traced back to the abolitionist movement. Specifically, the American-Anti Slavery Society denounced slavery as a sin that must be abolished immediately; and endorsed nonviolence while condemning racial prejudice. Consequently, their acts positively impacted a free society. Even during the country’s infancy as a democracy, President Abraham Lincoln understood that the basic principles of democracy existed because “it is the people, not the government, who are

Martin Luther King, Jr. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.],” what he said in 1963…“there are two types of laws: just and unjust,” has served as a catalyst for acts of peaceful civil disobedience such as global warming and gun control. More recently, in January 2017, one million women and their families converged on our Nation’s capital, joined by millions more worldwide. To honor and uphold our democracy, they united to voice concerns for any laws or polices that would detrimentally affect the rights of women, minorities, the disabled, the LGBTQIA Community, and people of diverse religious faiths; and it was through their nonviolent acts that they gathered that day; and have vowed to do so again in the coming months, to ensure a more democratic and inclusive society for all and to make a positive impact on the United States and on the