Order versus Justice

Responding to your defense of the MLK Day protesters being arrested and charged for trespassing.

Your comment asserts that the protestors broke the law, deserved to be arrested, and, in fact, desired to be arrested. There’s so many assumptions in there that I don’t see the point of going into that part of it.

The judge will decide if they broke the law or not. And it’s best not to make assumptions about whether their actions led to the officers arresting them. As we know from many, many cases, police can detain, arrest, beat, and even shoot people whenever they feel they ought to.

But I want to highlight the crucial thing that the article was about, which you ignored. Namely, the extreme irony that protestors were arrested for peaceful protest about racism and the criminal justice system at an event celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was on the basis of this extreme irony that I wrote to the Mayor to use his influence to get the charges against the protestors dropped.

I am not making a legal case for the charged to be dropped — that’s up to the lawyers and the judge.

I am making a moral and political argument that the Mayor and all of us need to really think about whether — as MLK said in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” — we value order or justice. In other words, whether we are for throwing the book at protestors because of a disruption of everyday life, or whether we defend standing up for justice even if it means disruption.

I’m saying that if we value King’s life and work, we need to seriously think about the police killing of Julius Tate, Jr., of Henry Green, of Tyre King, of so many others, and not silence the voices of those who use protest to raise these issues.

In all seriousness, I invite you to read what King has to say about this issue of “order and justice.” He takes on this issue directly; it’s like he’s speaking to us right now, to this very debate.

He argues, and this is a direct quote:

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

And then he goes on to define, at length, what just and unjust laws are.

Or let’s be honest and say, actually, we don’t value King as much as we say we do. We don’t think people should make a big deal about him.

That we are less interested in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” than the fact that he was in jail, and should have been put in jail. Because after all, MLK and his supporters did in fact break the law, several times.

At the end of the day, I see this as a debate not about the law or the proper place to protest, but about the issues they are protesting about. A society that does not want to address systematic racism in the criminal justice system very often turns to blame those who raise the issue — in whatever forum.