Where did the meme come from that civil disobedience requires you to sit in jail afterwards?

[limpyhobbler]

28. There's not agreement on that in the definition of civil disobedience.

I know this because I just checked the Wikipedia page and it said different people interpret it in different ways.

To my understanding civil disobedience would be when you face the civil penalty, get arrested or whatever. That's what the "civil" part means, I think. It doesn't mean "civil" as in "polite". It means you recognize the legitimacy of the civil authorities but you can't obey the law as a matter of conscience, so you face the civil penalty. Either that or you don't recognize the legitimacy of the civil authority but you choose to respect it as a tactic, and face the legal consequences.

Other wise it would be just disobedience, not civil disobedience. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with plain old disobedience in some cases. I think snowden did the right thing, but I wouldn't call it civil disobedience. I think H.D. Thoreau coined the term, and he went to jail over not paying taxes because we was against war and slavery.

Modern examples are MLK and Gandhi. Older classic examples are Thomas More and Socrates. All accepted their punishments, which is in fact what makes them the classic cases if civil disobedience.

It's not a clearly defined term though so it is debatable either way. I can see both sides. "Civil" can also mean "polite" or "non-violent".