Published: Good Men Project (March 30, 2015)
It is time to bring the nonviolent protests of the 1960s civil rights movement to anti-gay Indiana.
I don’t live in Indiana, and because I don’t own a car, there is little chance I’ll be visiting anytime soon. Nevertheless, like most decent people, I am horrified by Indiana’s recent so-called “religious freedom” bill that would allow businesses to discriminate against homosexuals (they claim that pro-gay rights modifications to the measure are pending; I’ll believe it when I see it). As similar bills continue to get pushed in states throughout the country (including Georgia, Michigan, Arkansas, Texas, and Nevada), it is time we take a look at the revered American tradition, one that half a century ago resulted in a civil rights act that guaranteed “full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”
I’m referring to civil disobedience.
The term was first coined by American philosopher Henry David Thoreau in 1849, when he wrote an essay about his refusal to pay a poll tax in 1846 due to his disgust with the Mexican-American War and the institution of slavery. After spending a day in prison, Thoreau concluded that he had upheld an important standard, one that he felt was integral to the preservation of human freedom:
“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right…. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
Of course, although Thoreau was forced to take a stand against unjust policies that could be clearly traced back to the actions of the state, many of his successors have had more nebulous targets. By the 1960s, civil rights protesters were performing sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South which refused to serve African American customers. Unlike Thoreau, their target wasn’t the federal state itself, but rather bigoted men and women who were allowed to enforce social discrimination with their local governments’ acquiescence. Additionally, the civil rights protesters of the 1960s were motivated by more than a simple desire to make peace with consciences; as inhabitants of the post-TV era, they knew that garnering publicity for the act of being brutally arrested and incarcerated simply for wanting to be treated like equals would compel popular opinion to act on their behalf.
They weren’t wrong. Moreover, their logic still applies today.
Perhaps one of the first signs that America would need a renaissance in civil disobedience appeared in 2010, when then-Senate candidate Rand Paul argued that while he would have supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he was concerned that enforcing it today would imperil “freedom of speech.” This isn’t dissimilar from the position commonly presented in defense of “religious freedom” bills, in that both lines of reasoning argue that an individual’s right to express a despicable opinion – including, in this case, enforcing a culture of social ostracism by refusing to do business with men and women they choose to hate – trumps the need to protect potential victims from acts of discrimination.
The problem with this argument is twofold. For one thing, it subordinates the constitutional right to equal access (and its implied but all-important brother, equal opportunity) to the doctrine of individualism. Just as my right to lash a whip ends where your body or property begins, so too does a business owner’s right to decide who shall patron his or her establishment cease to matter once they use that liberty to deprive others of their own freedom. Indeed, there is something particularly perverse about seeing these measures characterized as acts that protect the “religious freedom” of others, as it is yet one more unsettling echo of the rhetoric that was used to thwart civil rights for a century after the Civil War. In those days, of course, it was the doctrine of “states’ rights” that was supposedly being protected, with a white citizen’s right to local laws of his or her own choosing trumping a non-white citizen’s right to a non-discriminatory social environment. Today, even though no one is being prohibited from their First Amendment right to “the free exercise” of their religion by being forced to serve homosexuals, the measures that enable them to persecute members of the LGBT community are justified on libertarian grounds.
This brings us to the other big problem with the bill: In dealing entirely with legal abstractions, even inaccurate ones, it disregards the human element of this story.
Hence the role of civil disobedience. If anything, the cultural atmosphere today is more conducive to the theatricality necessary for a successful high profile civil disobedience campaign (emphasis on “high profile,” since these efforts rarely do much social good unless there is a large audience). Thanks to the Internet, virtually anyone can upload a video of themselves being arrested simply for being gay in the wrong restaurant. What’s more, so long as the social justice subculture continuing to thrive online, there is an assured audience of millions for those who choose to take this stand. Finally, because of the seismic shift in national attitudes toward gay rights in this decade alone, potential civil disobedient protesters have the inestimable advantage of finding themselves on the right side of history. So long as they follow the three cardinal rules of effective civil disobedience – i.e., remain nonviolent and courteous no matter what; accept the legal consequences of your actions as the necessary price to be paid for breaking the law, even an unjust one; and do everything you can to publicize your actions – they will face support from all but the most staunchly prejudiced.
It isn’t a coincidence that this article has intermixed discussions of the civil rights movement with the gay rights movement. In the end, laws like the “religious freedom” bill in Indiana aren’t simply a threat to homosexuals, or even to other groups that have previously experienced widespread social discrimination. The same logic that can be used to wrest an African American’s or homosexual’s social rights in the name of “liberty” can be used against anyone, regardless of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or any other aspect of their background. Standing against this sort of thing is only right… and nothing could be more American than doing so with acts of civil disobedience.