Posted on 04/04/2018 12:02:15 PM PDT by Behind the Blue Wall
On the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, if you can indulge me a quick soapbox about the political use and abuse of his legacy.
I'm not going to argue that MLK was exclusively a man of the right. He wasn't and his legacy isn't. Most of us know of his too close for comfort associations with Communists, as well as the extent to which some of his ideals and rhetoric veered off into leftist territory, particular in his later (and less successful) years.
But there is far too much that is valuable about the man and his legacy to let those things cut him off from us, particularly when they are viewed against how the left and right have evolved over the past couple of decades.
King's most influential messages were grounded in the Bible, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He was a Christian and an American patriot. The left hates all of that.
King's most famous speech called for people to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The left judges everyone based on skin color, and rejects all judgment of character.
King was a product of solid and grounded social institutions. When not leading civil rights demonstrations, he was preaching in his father's church, located in a neighborhood in Atlanta full of black businesses, professionals and community institutions. The left wants to destroy civil society and replace it with totalitarian government.
King's essential quest was to appeal to the Judeo-Christian moral conscience of the nation in order to expand the American dream to include everyone regardless of race, and in that he succeeded. The left believes in moral relativism, and seeks to deny the American dream to as many as possible so as to maintain their power over them.
King was not a partisan of any kind, and instead challenged the leaders of both parties to confront the great moral questions of his day. The left expands and exploits partisan divisions in order to subvert anything that might transcend them.
I could go on, but suffice it to say, King is "problemmatic" for the left. He was not in any way postmodern, he believed in one God, one truth, and the difference between right and wrong. In the world we now inhabit, that makes him a "conservative".
Based on the responses in other threads around here a lot of conservatives don’t want him.
Categorically false.
I do not revere a drugs-and-orgies adulterer and plagiarist.
Give me Frederick Douglass. Give me Walter Williams.
I have a bump
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed matter: the guaranteed income… The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” – – Where do We Go from Here?, 1967.
“[W]e are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism…. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” – Speech to his staff, 1966.
We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… ”- Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967.
Have you looked at Selma lately?
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