Radical nun says answering her Christian calling landed her in prison

[jberryhill]

27. Let's see if we can follow a line of discussion, shall we?

The nice thing about a forum like this is that lines of discussion are neatly organized by actual graphic lines that can be followed.

1. Someone said that she is imprisoned as she "should" be.

2. You questioned why she "should" be imprisoned.

The answer to that is pretty simple. The POINT of civil disobedience is to do something illegal, get arrested, and then appeal to a sense of "why is this person in jail for having a deep moral conviction of some kind?"

You seem to believe one of the two following propositions:

1. Moral convictions with which I disagree are invalid.

2. People who engage in civil disobedience in the furtherance of causes should not be penalized, if I agree with the cause.

We could simply abandon enforcement of laws so long as the violators had a sincere moral conviction for doing so. That would have two effects:

1. People whose moral convictions I find odious - racists, homophobes, and various religionists - would be as annoying as hell.

2. The entire dynamic of civil disobedience would have no meaning. Again, the moral force of civil disobedience arises from the unconscionability of punishing someone whose actions arise from a "just" cause.

What you seem to have is an unerring ability to distinguish what is "right and just" from things which aren't. What follows from this is a sense that, so long as someone's definition of "right and just" falls within whatever you have decided it to be, then they should be immune from objective application of the law. In other words, every "no trespassing" sign has an invisible asterisk to the footnote which says "unless your sincere moral convictions dictate otherwise."