Justifying the Unjust

Janell Howard

09/07/2016

Humanities

McCoy

Justifying the Unjust

        Humans are morally obliged to break unjust laws. "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

        Laws are basically the government’s way of controlling us as people and how we live. Each law set in stone restricts each citizen in some shape or form, their individuality, their personality, their lifestyle, anything. Moral is the discerning of right from wrong and feeling bad when you do wrong. If a law is unjust it means that it doesn’t protect everyone equally. If someone is supposed to be protected just as equally as the next person, but he sees that he is treated less equally, he is morally obliged to fight for what he thinks is right, regardless of the laws that are in place.

        In Martin Luther King’s, Letter from the Birmingham Jail, he defines just and unjust and show us that to him laws are just man made and meant to be broken., and that it isn’t stated in “God’s law” or the “natural law”. There are a few current events that show exactly why Martin Luther King’s opinions should be facts.

        One unjust law that is prominent in today’s society is same sex marriage. Same sex marriage just became legal in all 50 states in February of 2015. This “man led society” seeks to insist obvious gender roles and obligations, where men are supposed to be masculine and women are supposed to be feminine. The argument over gay rights is an extension of the unbiased gender systems and that man led society. Everyone is set and has learned that there should always be “Adam and Eve” and never “Adam and Steve” vice versa. Regardless of whether a man wants to be with the same sex or a woman the same sex, they should be able to do that. He or she should be able to be accepted the way they are. There should never have been a law to “deny a person’s personal choices.” In Martin Luther King’s letter he wrote, “We know through painful experience that freedom us never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” he knew that everyone didn’t support the rights of the minority people.