Elián González's Miami relatives have more in common with Orval Faubus than they do with Martin Luther King Jr.

With a showdown looming, Miami's "Eliánistas" have vowed a "civil disobedience" campaign to prevent the return of 6-year-old Elián González  to Cuba. By invoking the sacralized language of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement to describe their impending face-off with the government, the Eliánistas imply they're acting from a sense of conscience and in a noble tradition. To their critics, though, the civil disobedience call is just a cynical ploy.

When is "civil disobedience" honorable, and when is it a cover for self-serving lawlessness?

Arguments for civil disobedience date at least to Socrates, who disobeyed an unjust Athenian decree against teaching his ideas and was condemned to death. More recently, the doctrine was articulated (and acted upon) by Henry David Thoreau, who in the 1850s urged Massachusetts residents to withhold taxes so as not to support slavery or the Mexican war. In the 1920s and '30s, Mohandas Gandhi began his nonviolent protests of British rule in India. But it was King who put the phrase into the American vernacular and the practice into American history books.

Besides being a practitioner, King was also a philosopher of civil disobedience. Having studied Thoreau, Gandhi, and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King knew you can't break laws—even patently unjust laws—lightly. You need philosophical justification. In his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," written when he was imprisoned in 1963 for trying to desegregate the city's public facilities, King offered his best-known encapsulation of his philosophy.

To justify disobedience to the law, King wrote, the law itself has to be unjust. Unjust laws include those that degrade people's humanity and those inflicted on a minority that had no say in enacting them. Alabama's Jim Crow statutes clearly fit both categories.

E qually important is the manner of disobedience, King wrote. "One who breaks an unjust law," he insisted, "must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty." This approach and spirit demonstrate, King noted, that the disobedient "is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." (This idea also goes back to Socrates, who cooperated in his own punishment by stoically quaffing the fatal hemlock he was given.)

Taking his cues from King, John Rawls, the pre-eminent postwar liberal philosopher, distilled the principles of civil disobedience in his famous work A Theory of Justice. (This summary is a little unfair to Rawls. Click for an explanation.) An act of civil disobedience, he noted, is motivated by conscience. Yet it is also political in character. The protester appeals to political—as opposed to, say, religious—principles in order to redress a basic and thoroughgoing injustice in the political system.

Further, a civilly disobedient act is nonviolent. This shows that the violator, despite his disobedience, is operating, as Rawls put it, "within the limits of fidelity to law." For similar reasons, a civilly disobedient protester accepts the penalty for his action, as did Socrates and King. Finally, the act occurs publicly. It is a good-faith effort to submit to one's fellow citizens a considered opinion that the law is unjust. While philosophers have quibbled with Rawls' definition, it can serve as a sensible, moderate way to judge whether a violation of law—such as the Miamians have promised—amounts to civil disobedience.

So how do Elián's Miami boosters stack up? Let's assume they genuinely believe that returning the boy to Cuba would be morally wrong. This meets one requirement of civil disobedience—its conscientiousness. They also meet the requirement of acting publicly. They aren't spiriting the boy away in the night.

On two other counts—nonviolence and willingness to accept punishment—the Eliánistas don't seem to be honoring the tradition of King, although to be fair they haven't been put to the test. Certainly some of their rhetoric—such as Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas' suggestion (since retracted) that his police won't enforce the law—has been menacing, apparently meant to scare the federal government into backing off (a game of chicken) rather than to win sympathy by passive surrender in the face of injustice (à la King). It's hard to imagine that if faced with G-men, the Miamians would crumple to the pavement in the fetal position, let alone be willing to endure the savage beatings visited on the civil rights protesters.