After having “celebrated” the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, we once again have the opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of his contribution to American life and his legacy. A couple of articles help illustrate matters.
First, the DISNTR site focuses on his theology. Among the issues that are discussed include a commitment to the “social gospel”; equivocation about Christ’s resurrection; and questioning of Christ’s divinity. The author also makes reference to King’s blatant, repeated sexual sin in which he engaged when he circulated on his “civil rights” crusades in various cities.
And second, in an article by Boyd Cathey, we are made aware of some commentary by the late, great Sam Francis on the MLK holiday:
[T]he true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions—not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality—racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social—must be overcome and discarded.
By placing King—and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction—into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining—perhaps the defining—icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.
When the American people, through their representatives in Congress, agreed to this holiday, they were hoodwinked.
Senator John McCain at one point voted against the King holiday.
During the 2000 presidential contest McCain’s spokesman said this:
“King Day should have been rejected because its purpose is vitriolic and profane. By celebrating King as the incarnation of all they admire, they [black leaders] have chosen to glorify the histrionic rather than the heroic and by inference they spurned the brightest and the best among their own race. Ignoring the real heroes in our nation’s life, the blacks have chosen a man who represents not their emancipation, not their sacrifices and bravery in service to their country; rather, they have chosen a man whose role in history was to lead his people into a perpetual dependence on the welfare state…”
It’s surprising that anyone connected with McCain said that, Fred. But it’s true.