Posted on 07/01/2015 2:43:21 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
A number of prominent conservatives seem convinced that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have fought marriage equality. They are probably wrong.
In their fight against the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision, leading conservatives have been turning to an unlikely source for inspiration: Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (PDF), the collection of notes that King smuggled out of his jail cell during his eight-day detention for protesting the Jim Crow laws that sanctioned discrimination across the South.
The letter is one of the most iconic documents from of the Civil Rights era and includes King’s observations on the injustice of segregation and the daily humiliations that black men and women were suffering in their public and private lives.
Fast forward 50-plus years to Sunday morning when pastor-turned-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee referenced King as he decried the same-sex marriage ruling handed down last week as “judicial tyranny.” Huckabee also predicted that Christians across the country would “go the way of Martin Luther King,” and disobey the Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex marriages must be legal in all 50 states.
“In his brilliant essay, the letters from a Birmingham jail, (King) reminded us, based on what St. Augustine said, that an unjust law is no law at all,” Huckabee during an interview on ABC’s This Week. “And I do think that we’re going to see a lot of pastors who will have to make this tough decision.”
Days earlier, the National Organization for Marriage, which has long opposed marriage equality, cited the same clause in a blistering take down of the Court’s ruling, comparing it to the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared slavery constitutional.
As the marriage question has wound its way through the courts, conservatives from Franklin Graham to Tom DeLay and Dr. James Dobson (PDF) used the same portion of King’s letter to make the case that the Court’s decision to expand the right to marry would be unjust and immoral.
And when a group of Alabama pastors gave Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore an award earlier this year to recognize his efforts to stop same-sex marriage, they called it the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail Award.”
“King never said a law is immoral if it doesn’t line up with the bible. He would never have said anything like that.”
But King experts say the basic premise of equating King’s fight against segregation with moral objections to same-sex marriage doesn’t ring true to King’s broader message of inclusion, tolerance and the rights of minorities to live by the laws of the majority.
“King never said a law is immoral if it doesn’t line up with the bible. He would never have said anything like that. That’s not the way he thought,” said Doug Shipman, the founding director of the National Center for Civil Rights and Human Rights. “If you look at the letter, morality is bringing people together, not separating them from each other. So it seems odd that King would draw an exclusive line some place.”
More broadly, it also seems odd that some cultural and religious conservatives are increasingly appropriating not just the language of the Civil Rights movement, but are also identifying themselves as an oppressed minority in a country that remains mostly white and mostly Christian.
On Sunday, Roy Moore warned Alabama churchgoers that they should prepare for their persecution. “Welcome to the new world,” he said.
At a protest to keep the Confederate flag flying on the statehouse grounds in Alabama over the weekend, a woman carried a sign that read “Southern Lives Matter,” which spawned the Twitter meme #SouthernLivesMatter. It was exactly as ugly a cocktail as you’d expect from a combination of race, Twitter, and a discussion of the merits and shortcomings of the Confederacy.
At the same rally, a Confederate flag supporter told the AP, “Right now, this past week with everything that is going on, I feel very much like the Jews must have felt in the very beginning of the Nazi Germany takeover. I mean I do feel that way, like there is a concerted effort to wipe people like me out, to wipe out my heritage and to erase the truths of history.”
Those truths of history make it impossible to draw a straight line from American slavery to Nazi Germany to the Jim Crowe South to today’s conservatives who have seen social change sweep across the country in the last week and felt powerless to stop it.
Historically accurate or not, that lack of power, that sense of being a victim to current events, has become a key element of the new populism on the right that candidates like Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Scott Walker are trying to harness.
That explains Huckabee’s and other conservatives’ decision to graft the fight against gay marriage onto MLK’s fight for Civil Rights. It also makes Ted Cruz’s reaction to the marriage decision (telling an Iowa crowd that “the last 24 hours at the United States Supreme Court were among the darkest hours of our nation” and hitting the “elites” on the Court), make perfect sense. And it explains why Scott Walker would suggest a constitutional amendment on same sex marriage that would be ratified by the states through a vote of the people.
“By telling conservatives that their fight is as difficult and just and noble as those against slavery, segregation and Nazism, the GOPers are not only endorsing conservatives’ fight, they are also casting themselves as the next Lincoln, the next FDR, or the next MLK that history will require to overcome tyranny.”
When Huckabee quoted from King’s letter on Sunday, it wasn’t the first time. At the March for Marriage in front of the U.S. Capitol in 2014, he read lengthy passages of King’s words from a white iPhone to the crowd that had gathered to protest same-sex marriage.
“I wish I had penned those words,” Huckabee said. “But they were penned by someone who understood freedom, and understood that there was a time to stand up against law when it has become unjust. Those are the words that were penned in 1954 by Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from the Birmingham Jail.”
Among other omissions and inaccuracies, Huckabee botched the date King wrote the letter. It was in 1963.
The Dred Scotting of Religious Liberty ~~When Lincoln stopped believing in deference to the Supreme Court.~~
"Call it the Dred Scotting of religious liberty.
Writing gay marriage into the Constitution as once there was a Supreme Court decision that attempted to write slavery into the Constitution. Make no mistake. Whatever else the five lawyers in black robes thought they were doing with their ruling on gay marriage, they have opened the door — many think the door was already open — for a full-blown assault on religious liberty.
Who better to look to for a response to the Obergefell v. Hodges decision than the man who earned his marble statue on the Washington Mall by opposing the idea that the Dred Scott decision should be regarded as “settled law”?
Substitute the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage — which many Americans see as yet another assault on religious liberty — with the hotly controversial issue of the Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision on slavery. Or the Court’s 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland. The latter decision declared the Bank of the United States to be constitutional, the former was a deliberate attempt by Democrats on the bench to make slavery constitutional............."
Blaming Conservatives for the Left equating Blacks to sodomy.
When taking flak, you’re over the target.
This fits into the category of “A good defense is a good offense.”
Gay marriage is NOT something Black Americans, along with White Americans, or Hispanic Americans — let’s just say AMERICANS! — agree with. You might say that a majority of AMERICANS stand united against Gay marriage.
Since when are there “closet blacks”?
I don’t favor using electoral poitics as a method of opposing this. That’s a game of 3 card monte that conservatives will never win.
Living conservatively and figuring out ways AROUND caesar is I think a better plan. I do believe that the kleptocrats shot themselves in both feet with this one. Beyond further underlining their illegitimacy, allowing everyone to “marry” everyone else will murder social insecurity as people “marry” strictly for income enhancement reasons. Same thing with inheritances as widowed parents “marry” children to avoid inheritance taxes.
Pass some laws about beating prostitutes and being an all around degenerate and you’d have MLKs attention. I’m not in the MLK worshiping bandwagon by the way.
The source of this piece by Patricia Murphy of “The Beast” which seems to have MLK supporting sodomy. Is Murphy hijacking assertions made from lefty Douglas Shipman from the “National Center For Civil Rights and Human Rights”,very likely fed funded,supporting the racial division agenda of the regime ? It kinda looks that way doesn’t it ?
While we were constantly reminded by the selective repeating of the audio and visual later unincluded text portions of the Martin Luthur King Jr. famous “I have a dream “ speech.
The left and its media arm never makes references to the beginning and King’s references to the way this country was uniquely created with its purposes of existence declared through its carefully crafted Constitution, citing God gifts to mankind, and its Declaration of Independence .
They never cite King’s support and belief in it. Because it wouldn’t serve the purposes of racial division which King was against.
It’s not certain if Shipman’s organization had a hand in crafting that approach but it shouldn’t surprize anyone if it did.
On the other side of the coin:
“How The Left Hijacked Stalin To Bring Hope and Change and Fundementally Transform America”
We should refer to John Roberts as John “Taney” Roberts.
Neither am I. But the ones who claimed to be about Civil Rights are the leftists. And it’s never been answered to me about how you even need to “come out” about a visible trait such as skin tone. In addition to what you mentioned, I would add plagiarism, because it’s been found that he may very well have plagiarized some of his work.
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From that link:
"In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author.
[3:45 p.m. Eastern, 5/28/15: Please see an update on this story; the study has been retracted.]
Donald Green, of Columbia, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA, published the paper, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” in December 2014. The study received widespread media attention, including from This American Life, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Science Friday, Vox, and HuffingtonPost, as LaCour’s site notes.................................................."
It does.
His liberal, higher critical "theology" is available online for anyone who chooses to look it up. Conservative religious people have no business invoking this man, and furthermore there are Black conservative orthodox chrstians who know this but continue to act and speak as if King were simply a G-dly man fighting for G-d's laws. The entire liberal civil rights movement assumed "jim crow" was a Divine commandment (G-d forbid!) and that they were engaged in the beginning of a general war of liberating secularism against "primitive and unjust" religion; ie, "the same people who are against 'marriage equality' are the same people who owned slaves and lynched Black people."
King and all liberals opposed jim crow not for any religious reason, but for purely secular and rationalist ones. So probably did the vast majority of all Black ministers of the time, none of whom ever took part in the battle against G-dlessness.
Be sure to read Lord’s piece linked in Post #1.
I am well aware of the Scott decision and its similarity to this issue, as well as its similarity to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which led to the original formation of the Republican party.
I just thought you’d like Lord’s piece.
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