Civil Disobedience Rhetorical Analysis

Let me begin by stating that civil disobedience is only positive when it remains peaceful. Once it becomes violent, it is infringing on the rights of others and can no longer be called civil. Our country was founded on civil disobedience. The Declaration of Independence was an act of civil disobedience, which jumpstarted the War of Independence. The first amendment of the Constitution guarantees its citizens the right to protest, and the supremacy clause in article VI, clause 2, says that the states cannot take away any rights given to a citizen by the central government. In the 2003 case of Scheidler v. Nat’l Org. for Women, Inc. the Supreme Court ruled that civil disobedience was allowed if it didn’t violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt

Poet and author, Henry David Thoreau, in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience said “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.” Thoreau not only wrote about civil disobedience, but participated in it as well. In 1849, Thoreau was thrown in jail for refusing to pay for taxes that went toward the Mexican-American War, or slavery. When friends and neighbors came together to pay for his bail, he refused stating that in jail he felt freer than people on the outside. The U.S. Bill of Rights emphasizes that government is derived from the consent of the governed, and when that government becomes destructive it is the citizen’s duty to alter or abolish

is bursting with examples positive and successful cases of civil disobedience. Those disobediences were the start of the most important social reforms in our country’s shared history. In 1964, after the U.S. became involved in Vietnam, nearly a thousand students held a protest rally at Times Square in New York. In 1984, a group of protesters against the U.S.’s involvement in Central America rallied in front of the San Francisco Federal Building to get an anti-war protest document signed. There are many peaceful ways you can protest a war. In the past, there has been refusal to pay for war, or refusal to enlist in the military, occupation of draft centers, sit-ins, blockades, peace camps, and refusal to allow the military recruiters on a college or high school