I just spoke to Lynn Bradach, the Gold Star mom from Portland who I profiled recently in The Stranger.

Turns out Bradach, a 53-year-old woman who hasn’t received a parking ticket since she was in her 20s, much less been arrested, decided to be a part of that sit-in outside the White House on Monday at which Cindy Sheehan and about 370 other people—including Bradach—were hauled away in handcuffs.

I didn’t realize Bradach had been arrested until recently because she’d told me over the weekend, while we were at the huge anti-war march in D.C., that she wasn’t going to do any illegal civil disobedience. I’d assumed she’d stuck with that plan. But apparently she ended up in a crowd of other mothers of dead soldiers on Monday, mothers who, like Sheehan, were hanging pictures of their dead sons on the White House fence—which is apparently illegal. Bradach knew this, and handed to someone else her picture of her son, Travis, who was killed in Karbala in 2003. But as she did this, she told me, she “felt like I was giving Travis away, sort of deserting him. I mean, I’m his mother and I didn’t have the courage to be arrested for hanging his picture on the White House fence?”

So she took the picture back, hung it up herself, sat down in the street in front of the White House, and was promptly arrested, charged with protesting without a permit, and at 4 a.m. the next morning, was let go with a $75 fine.

Bradach admitted that the protesters who got arrested on Monday were trying to get more attention for their weekend march, which was almost ignored by much of the mainstream media. It worked, getting Bradach on several radio stations and in at least one print news story in Portland.

If getting arrested is what it takes to get attention for their anti-war message, will she and the Gold Star families be doing more civil disobedience?

“If it’s a necessary thing, yes,” she told me.