Disobey bad laws to show civil disobedience
DEAR EDITOR:
Should good people disobey bad laws as a way of civil disobedience?
We’re now going through another tax season, with over 74,000 pages of tax code to figure out what we owe the Federal Government. Remember that ignorance of the law is no excuse for failure to follow the law. We had the USA Patriot Act, that was passed in 2001 with 342 pages; it has now been sunset; but federal law enforcement agencies still retain most of the authorities granted by the act, which include spying on U.S. citizens.
How many new laws do we need? Once a law is written, seldom is it ever repealed. Instead, they (lawmakers) often double down and create additional laws on top of already existing laws.
Who in Congress reads these bills with the full understanding of what is being proposed? To what extent will it have a positive or negative impact on the citizenry?
We now have members of Congress that want to limit free speech through social media outlets. Is limited free speech really free speech? Where will we find these moral angels to tell the citizens what is truth and what requires censorship or cancellation? Does big tech have our best interest in mind, especially when it’s being directed by government bureaucrats? Just how many lies were we told, over the past few years, that when people spoke out in opposition against those lies, they were demoralized and characterized as radical nut jobs or crazy conspiracy theorists?
Here are some of the more recent one-sided stories fed to the public to fuel the Roman circus and disenfranchise critical thinkers: COVID-19 came from the wet market in Wuhan, China, not the virology lab that was studying this virus; the 2020 riots were mostly peaceful protests; the Russian dossier was credible; the Trump administration built cages for illegals — truth is the Obama-Biden administration built the cages; vaccines prevented COVID-19; unvaccinated people were endangering everyone else, even if those others were vaccinated; and the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
In addition, voting rights are under attack if you question ballot integrity and voter ID.
Many of us look at the atrocities that have occurred in the past 100 years and feel we would be on the right side of things. How many of you felt it was justified that people lost their jobs because they wouldn’t get a vaccine? The guards at Auschwitz were law-abiding citizens, following the law killing Jews. Ask yourself, on what side of history would you fall? Immoral laws warrant civil disobedience.
TIMOTHY SANTELL
Kinsman