Well I’m old enough to have heard MLK when he was alive so I’m pretty much immune to the Saint Martin myth that has become our national religion after his death.
MLK wasn’t a liberal. John Kennedy was a liberal. MLK was a leftist with two close advisers who were members of the CPUSA, Hunter Pitts O’Dell and Stanley Levison. This at a time when communism was an existential threat to the Free World. It was King’s close association with these two Party agents that moved Robert Kennedy to wiretap him.
King was without a doubt a plagiarist, his doctoral thesis contained large portions lifted word for word from another thesis. Ted Pappas wrote a book on King’s plagiarism and there has been at least one other. The Kennedy wiretaps also revealed the Reverend King to be an accomplished serial adulterer, one who makes Bill Clinton look like a choirboy. I think the good Reverend earns extra points for accomplishing this while being, well, a Reverend.
“If only the Democrats believed in those principles.”
I think nothing amuses me more than the habit here of imagining the Democrats as the fount of wickedness and the GOP as the source of goodness. The Democrat Party had a large group within it known as the Conservative Coalition, mostly Southern, that ran Congress from the 1930s until the mid 1960s. This coalition did more to stop FDR and his progressive heirs than anything the wimps in the GOP accomplished, in large measure because the GOP had a powerful progressive wing that dominated the party. This is the GOP wing that helped Lyndon Johnson pass his Great Society programs which included the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. It is this bill that greatly expanded the ability of the federal government to control more and more of your daily life. Be sure to thank all of those wonderful ‘pubbies for bringing this gift that keeps on giving to you.
I don’t doubt what you say about MLK. But we need to pick our battles, and now is certainly not the time to fight MLK. Anyone who does will quickly be branded a racist, not just by the liberal media, but by many (poorly informed) conservatives as well. I don’t normally believe in backing down from phoney charges of racism, but in this case it’s just a losing proposition. Sure, we can talk about MLK’s major flaws among ourselves, but if the Republicans went national with it they would get creamed. We need to just focus on his positives at this point. His message of nonviolence did save a lot of pain after all.
As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I am honestly not very familiar with the details in it, but my impression is that it was generally a very positive development. What in particular didn’t you like about it?