You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in public schools, at first glance it may seem paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just 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. I would agree with Saint Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
–Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ”Letter from Birmingham Jail” April 16, 1963
In some ways, it is ironic to use Dr. King as an example to promote nullification and interposition. Dr. King, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” makes one reference to nullification and interposition, and it is not a flattering one. Many state and local governments cited nullification when they refused to comply with federal legislation and court decisions against segregation. It is the one unfortunate blight one can find in the nullification movement throughout American history.
One single abuse of the process of nullification, however, should not serve to invalidate the entire nullification movement, which has resisted attacks on free speech, federal slave-catching laws, the destructive war on drugs, and a host of other federal abuses in history and in modern times. When one considers that the legitimate applications of nullification are rooted in the same beliefs Dr. King expressed, and which have been expressed by people of many different religious beliefs, that “an unjust law is no law at all.” That is, in a nutshell, the essence of nullification.
Had Dr. King lived at the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts or the Fugitive Slave Laws, I believe he most certainly would have found little to criticize about the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions or the Personal Liberty Acts – the latter of which were an effective tool in the fight against slavery in the 19th Century.
The same Supreme Court that, in 1890, had declared “separate but equal” to be the way in Plessy vs. Ferguson, reversed precedent in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. Many southern states, as well as some northern states, refused to follow that decision, effectively nullifying the Supreme Court’s decision. Birmingham was one of the most heavily segregated cities in that time.
Martin Luther King, Jr., while not the first, was one of the better known civil rights leaders to engage in civil disobedience against segregation ordinances through boycotts of buses, sit-ins and peaceful demonstrations, some without a permit. This approach, in theory and in practice, treated the unjust segregation ordinances as being null, void and of no force. Sound familiar? Yes, it is the stuff of which proper nullification is made, a fact which Dr. King himself might not have even actively considered, but a fact nonetheless.
Become a member and support the TAC!
Dr. King was not a governor, state legislator, county sheriff, mayor or town legislator. He was a minister, one who believed in self purification before direct action, one who quoted the likes of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, one who compared the civil rights struggle with the missions of both Old Testament prophets and New Testament Apostles. He was one who, if he were alive today, might be told to leave religion out of his rhetoric, even by people who agreed with him about the existence of injustice and the goal of desegregation.
Dr. King, as a religious, individual nullifier, risked more than any elected state or local official by refusing to accept injustice. Elected officials who nullify are not the ones targeted for arrest, yet those who refuse to obey an unjust law individually or as part of a group face that risk daily. Despite this risk, he continued to do what he believed to be right.
Through violent responses from his opponents, imprisonment, and even death, he earned the right to sing the spiritual of old, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!”
The truth was he lived Nullification unlike so many who believe it must be a process through a legislation to get permission to go against another and his was not only federal unjust laws but state unjust laws.
His self purification is how all just people find themselves whether religious or not, meaning we find out what is real and not real by looking at ourselves. To be honest with our findings and changing those things about us that go against ourselves as Life and Martin Luther King Jr. supported life in a free state of Being. Something so many did not get from him at all.
If there ever was a man who lived his own words and let it be seen far and wide by his example Dr. King delivered one of the best examples of my life time and I would compare his great example to President John F. Kennedy who was also a great example of integrity and both Died for being free of the distorted unjust thinkers of our solar system.
Both showed there were rules made up not in the support of Life and that we should reject these at all costs self included.
Ron Paul is this light today and is the brightest example showing us how corrupt Government truly is and still today all want to use the unjust process to implement Nullification.
I am with Martin Luther King Jr. let us learn how to control ourselves and know what independence is by living it and nullify everything outside of it working to stop such a supporting choice of self. Our State and Federal Governments are out of control in so many ways just is a row of symbols with no act in sight. To be honest with self about LIFE support by actions is integrity, is “just” self is the truth for which we all are and when left to this means is living free of impostors working against ourselves.
For all Life leaves no life out and is all inclusive, one word, one life of a galaxy all here to make it and not here to distort it. A word written so long ago, declared so very long ago, announce to a just world so long ago not in use today by every agreement made because all refused to use that document, we set it aside, refused its instructions at ALL costs including ourselves to nullify the unjust in our world by living and breathing Independent life every single moment of every single new day. An act Martin Luther King himself exemplified through and through.
The END (because we refused it, a foundation of ourselves).
These videos are the most important of your life today, stop what you are doing and LISTEN, we will need each other to move forward and we finally have our opportunity. More is coming. You are all now served.
http://peoplestrust1776.org/