apushatayid: “Are you high on Xanax?”
Besides the fact that Daniel Rosen is 100% right, it think it is ironic how you are the one showing such a lack of derech eretz when you are the one arguing how severely a lack of derech eretz should be punished.
The issue comes down to who was more immoral: The judge or the girl. As DR said, I do not think it is immoral to show a lack of respect to a man-made, flawed and possibly corrupt system that threw you in prison for a reason you legit. disagree with. I do think it is immoral to take someone away from their loved ones and family and make them give you all the money they make for an entire year because they were rude.
BTW, Do you know that in accordance with the legal system of the State of Washington it would be illegal for Avroham Avinu to marry Sarah because they prohibit first cousin marriage but it is perfectly legal for two men to marry each-other? Can anyone make sense of this?
Would the people who say “the law is the law whether you agree with it or not” agree with these statements:
In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a “necessary evil”. White people of that time feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery.
In 1820, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote in a letter that with slavery:
We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.[118]
Robert E. Lee wrote in 1856:
There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.[119]
Now you can see the difference between our system of law and our poskim apposed to secular law. We are following the same halacha and learn the same books now as we did in the 1800’s going all the way back thousands of doros. Secular law changes with the times and whims of the generation.
If you are going to say that the girl was 100% percent wrong for being rude to a system that took away her freedom then you at least have to be consistent and say the court of 200 years ago in the US deserves the same respect. After all- “denei demalchusa…”