The message was standing up for moral conviction with non-violent action, even if it means going to jail.
    Some in the crowd of a little more than 100 that gathered in Unitarian Universalist Church on Elmwood Avenue near West Utica Tuesday night may have quibbled with some of the Lapp family's views of government, but most appeared to respect the integrity of the messengers.
    "You can't ask for nicer people, there's noting pushy about them," Bill Tanner of Jamestown said after listening to sisters Barbara Lyn Lapp and Rachel B. Lapp speak.
    Tanner has known the Lapp family of Cassadaga for years, long before they made national headlines in 1993 for sheltering a boy who was at the center of child custody case in Chautauqua County Family Court.
    The Lapp sisters, their father, and brother-in-law spent eight months in a Mayville jail for defying authorities and harboring 15-year-old Billy Stefan on their family farm in Cassadaga.
    The boy, whose father was accused of abusing him, was reunited with his father after he turned 16.
    "These are educated people. You can see that they offer a lot of food for thought. Sometimes I get more out of this than Sunday morning," Tanner said, adding that it would be nice to have plain-spoken, common sense people like the Lapps serving as judges.
    The sisters and their father, Jacob, shared the podium with community activist Samuel Radford III and Frank Parlato Jr.
    All spoke of the need to obey a higher law than those written down to and take personal responsibility for changing what they perceive as abuses by the government, particularly the courts and the education system.
    "So what do you do when you see the law is wrong and the government is bullying some one? At the very least, you don't respect it," Barbara Lapp said, calling on her audience to practice "responsible non-compliance."
    Parlato said the forum represented a counterpoint to the violent militia movement, which also sees the government as a threat to individual liberty, but uses violent means to try and change it.
    "Love, truth, and non-violence. These are the antidotes to tyranny," said Parlato, a Greenpeace activist.
    But some felt the Lapps did not give enough information about how to change things. "I wanted to learn more about civil disobedience," Barbara Vaughan of Kenmore said.