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| Date Posted |
February 14, 2006 |
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Top News Story 1 |
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'Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.'' This aphorism wasn't Dr. Martin Luther King's motto, but it might have been. Dr. King had a dream, but he wasn't a dreamer. He was a remarkable orator, but he was not just a talker. He preached nonviolence and respect, but he wasn't passive in the face of injustice.
That is why the right-wing assault on Coretta Scott King's memorial service is so misplaced. The right-wing choir is in high voice denouncing former President Jimmy Carter and former Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Rev. Joseph Lowery for bringing politics into a funeral, and for using the platform to criticize President Bush's policies implicitly but clearly.
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin called their remarks "ungodly." "Inappropriate" and designed to "embarrass the president," said TV host Sean Hannity.
Lowery said, "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there [in Iraq]. . . . But Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right here. . . . Millions without health insurance. . . . For war billions more, but no more for the poor. . . ." President Carter evoked the pain suffered by Dr. King from the illegal surveillance and wiretaps of the FBI.
Memorial services are meant to pay tribute to the lives and the struggles of the deceased. No one would modify the memorial for Moses to make the pharaoh feel better. Lowery's and Carter's words paid direct tribute to Dr. King and Coretta. Their willingness to afflict the comfortable was faithful to the teachings of the heroine they mourned. It was Dr. King who taught us to use every occasion to challenge those supporting injustice with their action or their inaction.
For example, two weeks after his famous speech at the March on Washington in September 1963, Dr. King delivered the eulogy at the funeral for four little girls killed when their Birmingham church was firebombed. Their loss weighed heavily on Dr. King, Coretta and the civil rights activists. They knew the risks.
Dr. King felt that agony personally. At the funeral service, he paid memorable tribute to those innocent spirits. He comforted their grieving families. But he also invoked the slain children to challenge the powerful and the content: ''They are . . . martyred heroines. . . . They have something to say to every minister of the Gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. . . . They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. . . . They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of Southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing Northern Republicans. . . . They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice.''
Bush chose to come to the funeral, but he stands on the other side of history from Dr. King and Coretta. She opposed the war in Iraq. She decried the immoral priorities of this administration. Bush went directly from the memorial service to release a federal budget that mocked the memory of Dr. King and Coretta. More than $500 billion -- half a trillion dollars -- for the Pentagon, more tax cuts for millionaires, while cutting children from Head Start, raising health care costs on the poor and the elderly, cutting back on home heating and raising the cost of student loans.
There are those who want to erase the reality that the president was and is on the wrong side of the human rights and justice struggle in America that Dr. King and Coretta led. The president has a right to be on that side of history. What he does not have a right to be is a wolf in sheep's clothing, pretending to be supportive of the civil-rights and human-rights struggle that they lived. Lowery and Carter ensured the funeral service broke through that lie.
Lowery and Carter brought clarity where there was confusion in an attempt to blur history. No greater tribute could be paid to Coretta and Dr. King than to use every exalted mountain and every low valley to put forth principle for the sake of justice. Mrs. King's life exemplified the words of the Scripture (Micah 6:8): ''Love mercy, do justice and walk humbly before thy God."
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