Few groups of people in America today produce as much mythistorical bunk as the Religious Right, and few people are victimized by their distortions than the so-called Founding Fathers. In order to manufacture the unitary conservative Christian heritage for America that they pin their nationalist mythistory on, Christian fundamentalists routinely repeat cherry-picked quotes or outright fabrications in order to distort the religious views of the Founders. Another favorite target is the notion of separation between Church and State: the Religious Right has spent the past few decades trying to manufacture a historical-legal account on which (1) when the Founders wrote the First Amendment, they did not intend for it to enact anything like what we now call separation between Church and State, and (2) that this notion, completely alien to the Constitution, was invented by activist judges. Here, for example, is a typical presentation of the doctrine, by Stephen Erwin in The Rule of Law (2004-01-12):

Judge Moore held in his Eleventh Circuit Court appeal that the First Amendment bans any law respecting (regarding) an establishment of religion. The judge correctly points out that because of its no law language, the First Amendment proscribes only laws and his monument was not a law. The Eleventh Circuit totally failed to provide a reasonable explanation of how or why his position was wrong. Their only answer was to say that precedent (state decisis) requires separation of church and state and to express horror that if we adopted his position, the Chief Justice would be free to adorn the walls of the Alabama Supreme Court’s courtroom with sectarian religious murals and have decidedly religious quotations painted above the bench. Every government building could be topped with a cross, or a menorah, or a statue of Buddha, depending upon the views of the officials with authority over the premises. A crèche could occupy the place of honor in the lobby or rotunda of every municipal, county, state, and federal building.

These judges have completely forgotten that an independent and impartial judge is bound to interpret the law and let the legislature correct any problems that may result from a fair interpretation of that law. Political correctness is simply not within the official purview of our courts.

The separation of church and state is a concept that is not found anywhere in the Constitution. It is just one of many red t-shirts invented by our courts. And as long as we allow our imperial judiciary to ban red t-shirts there will be no legitimate rule of law.

Now, let’s set aside for a moment the non sequitur involved in the argument that the actions of a government employee funded by legislatively-appropriated tax dollars somehow sidestep the First Amendment’s concern with the laws passed by the legislature. There’s an argument to be had about the specifics of Roy Moore’s case, but that’s an argument I’ve already had elsewhere. What I want to focus on here is the historical-legal story underlying its application to the specific case; and for a Religious Rightist wanting to push some theocratic public display or another, it is a handy little historical-legal story indeed. For one, it allows the Rightist to construct a poignant tale of historical decline from our lofty origins. For two, it lets the myth-makers get into their favorite pose as myth-busters; many people do seem to be under the mistaken impression that the phrase separation between Church and State appears in the First Amendment, and the Religious Rightist can point out that it doesn’t. Finally, it their Constitutional prooftexting allows them to ascribe the last few decades of First Amendment case law entirely to the malign influence of Activist Judges, the most devious fiends in the Religious Right demonology. The problem is that the story is false on several points and deceptively selective on others.

Now, Erwin and other conservative Christians are right to point out that separation between Church and State is a phrase that does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution, and never has. This is what the First Amendment actually says:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

What exactly mak[ing] no law respecting an establishment of religion means might not be entirely clear at first glance. One way to cash it out would be separation between Church and State. But that’s not necessarily the only possible interpretation of the text, and the Religious Rightist is right to want to know where this principle was introduced from, if judges are going to go around using it in their legal reasoning. But the problem is that, contrary to the claims of Erwin and other conservative Christians, the principle does not originate from some activist judge toiling to undo our national piety in the middle of the 20th century. The phrase comes from no less an authority on the founding documents than Thomas Jefferson, who explicitly offered it as his understanding of the First Amendment’s provisions in a letter to Danbury Baptist Church in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

–Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists, 1 January 1802

(As a historical side-note, Jefferson’s letter was meant to reassure the Danbury Baptists that the Federal government had no power to regulate religious expression; the Baptists in America during the Founding generation were among the leading crusaders for complete separation of Church and State. Oh how things change in this fallen world!)

Of course, it’s true that Jefferson was not the author of the First Amendment. That’s true; but he did coin the phrase specifically to explain what he understood the First Amendment to mean. And it would be hard to say that Jefferson was not in at least as good, or better, of a position to know what the people who did write the First Amendment (including friends and colleagues such as James Madison) meant by it than Stephen Erwin, ex-Chief Justice Roy Moore, and others who decry the separation doctrine are. Furthermore, Jefferson was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which the establishment clause and the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment were derived from. Whatever the merits or demerits of judicial activism may be, the wall of separation is not an example of it; it is a gloss of the First Amendment first introduced by one of the most prominent of the Founders, who was in a very good position to claim some authority on what the proper meaning of the First Amendment was.

Now there’s a second line of attack that some Religious Rightists have pushed (Alan Keyes, in particular), with a bit more justice: some have pointed out that the First Amendment explicitly restricts only Congress (meaning the Congress of the United States); and that even if the First Amendment did impose a wall of separation between Church and State in the federal government, it was not understood, by Jefferson or anyone else at the time, to have anything to say about how state governments could conduct their affairs. Yet most of the modern applications of the separation doctrine are rulings on state governments–e.g. on state laws requiring prayer in government schools or on the actions of state judges such as ex-Chief Justice Roy Moore. So how does the modern legal doctrine of separation relate at all to what Jefferson meant by the phrase?

Now let’s be straight: the fundamentalists are right that when the First Amendment was written, it was understood to constrain only the federal government. State governments were widely understood to have the right to establish churches and pass laws restricting the free exercise of religion. (Congregationalist Massachussetts, for example, had an established church from the adoption of the Constitution up to 1833.) But so what? For one, the much-lamented activist judges do not, and very obviously do not, enforce the separation doctrine on the states on the basis of the First Amendment alone. The legal reasoning behind decisions such as Engel v. Vitale was based on the First Amendment together with the Fourteenth Amendment, which says (among other things):

Amendment XIV

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

One plausible reading of the emphasized portion is that the Fourteenth Amendment extends the protections granted to citizens of the United States in the Bill of Rights to include protection from violations by state as well as the federal government. Maybe that reading of the Fourteenth Amendment is inaccurate; but if the Religious Right wants to make that claim they are going to have to give some substantive argument against it, rather than deceptively pointing to the text of the First Amendment, as if that were the only part of the Constitution in question.

In any case, whether the incorporation doctrine is a good reading of the Fourteenth Amendment or not, there is another point on which the Religious Rightists’ arguments here are deceptive. It’s true that Jefferson and his compatriots only understood the First Amendment to constrain the federal government. But the package-dealed suggestion that they didn’t have any problem with state-level breaches of the wall of separation is plainly false. Jefferson may have believed that the First Amendment only imposed a wall of separation between the church and the federal government, but that does not mean that he didn’t think that the same separation shouldn’t be effected elsewhere. Jefferson, for example, drafted the state law that disestablished the Anglican Church in Virginia and James Madison ensured that it would be passed by the state legislature. Several other states also disestablished their churches around the time of the Revolution; even the late hold-outs such as Massachussetts eventually concluded that separation was a doctrine whose time had come, and had eliminated the last vestiges of established churches in America by the early 19th century. Jefferson did not think that the wall of separation between Church and State was a merely legal principle; he and many of his fellow Founders thought it was a moral principle that ought to apply to every level of government whatever, and they actively campaigned to get it so applied. As he eloquently put it in the Virginia Statute:

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness; and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; …

And though we well know that this assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act shall be an infringement of natural right.

Amen, brother.

The separation between Church and State was not a bit of judicial hokum cooked up in the head of some activist judge somewhere around 1962. The Founders really did intend for there to be a wall of separation between Church and State, and they did what they could to put the masonry up. Jefferson was wrong about many things in his life, but he was right about this.

Seven years ago today, on 29 January 1998, an anti-personnel bomb studded with nails exploded at the New Woman All Women health clinic in Birmingham. The clinic was targeted for bombing because it provided abortions; a nurse named Emily Lyons was maimed in the explosion and Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer working for the clinic as a security guard, was killed. An anti-abortion fanatic claiming to be a member of the Army of God sent anonymous letters to the media taking credit for the bombing; the murderer was probably Eric Robert Rudolph, also suspected in the bombing of an abortion clinic, a lesbian nightclub, and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Rudolph was finally captured in May 2003, and he is now standing trial for murder in Birmingham, and awaits trial in Georgia for the Atlanta bombings. I think that at this point there is every reason to believe that he’s guilty as hell, and also that he will be convicted of cold-blooded murder and justice will be done. Of course justice will not bring Robert Sanderson back and it will not heal Emily Lyons’ wounds. But it is something to hope for, even if any victory in this case will be one gained with terrible sadness.

This seems, actually, to be a point that unites nearly everyone. Both pro-choicers and most anti-abortionists have condemned Rudolph as a dangerous fanatic, a murderer, and a terrorist; both pro-choice and pro-life organizations issued public statements celebrating Rudolph’s capture. Now, I don’t want to spoil this remarkable point of unity against violence. But the simple truth is that I don’t know how it can be supported. I understand why I am glad that Rudolph is finally facing murder charges, and why my fellow pro-choicers and I condemn him as a murderer. But I don’t see how most of the anti-abortion movement’s reaction to Rudolph could result from anything other than a profound distortion of their beliefs. Let me explain.

Most people who oppose abortion–at least, most of those who express their opposition as part of the organized and agitating anti-abortion movement–claim to believe that, as a matter of moral principle, abortion under almost all circumstances is murder. They tell us that that is why they oppose it: that the intentional killing of an embryo or a fetus is a violation of the rights of that embryo or fetus just as much as infanticide is a violation of the rights of the baby.

Now, I think that this claim is outrageously false, and that the arguments for it use profoundly misogynist premises in order to justify the most brutal sorts of State violence against women. But my beliefs aren’t the issue here. The question is whether pro-lifers actually believe this. Let’s take a quick review of the facts (thanks to the Alan Guttmacher Institute):

• About 1/2 of all unplanned pregnancies in the United States are terminated in abortion.

• Every year, about 2 out of every 100 women aged 15-44 has an abortion.

• In 2000, in the United States alone, about were 1,360,000 abortions performed. About 1,300,000-1,400,000 abortions are performed every single year in the United States; from 1973, when Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion in all 50 states, to 2000, about 39,000,000 abortions were performed.

For those of us who believe that abortion is a woman’s right, these numbers may or may not be troubling, depending on what they tell us about other issues that we care about (such as the availability of contraception and responsible sex education). But consider what they mean to someone who earnestly believes that almost every single abortion is an act of murder. If you really believe that, and you have even a marginally adequate grasp on how common abortion is, then a fortiori you must believe that well over 1,000,000 people are being murdered every single year while the United States government stands by allowing most of those murders and even protecting the women who have them committed and the doctors who they hire to carry them out.

If you earnestly believe that abortion is murder, in other words, you are committed to believing that you are living through what is probably the worst holocaust in the history of humanity. How should someone witnessing murder on so massive a scale, ignored or even protected by the government and sanctioned by official organs of the medical establishment, react?

If that is what you earnestly believe, then why wouldn’t you react as Eric Rudolph and James Kopp did–by setting out to stop abortion providers, injuring or killing them if necessary? You might say Well, that doesn’t seem pro-life at all! But if someone earnestly believes that abortion is murder, hten why wouldn’t he or she also believe that injuring or even killing an abortion provider in order to stop that murder is a legitimate use of violence in defense of the innocent? Particularly when every single day that passes with an abortion provider healthy and working means that (according to your beliefs) nearly 4,000 more innocent people will be murdered?

Now, I can think of some reasons why someone who earnestly believed abortion to be murder still wouldn’t start attacking abortion providers. The problem is that none of them can account for all the prominent members of the anti-abortion movement, let alone everyone in the anti-abortion rank-and-file. You might, for example, believe that abortion is murder but refuse to use violence to stop it because you’re a principled pacifist, and believe that even violence in defense of self or innocent others is unjustified. Some consistent-ethic-of-life abortion opponents do endorse, or come very close to endorsing, a comprehensive principled pacifism. But most of the anti-abortion movement does not; the Catholic hierarchy mainly supports Just War theory and conservative evangelical abortion opponents such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson loudly trumpet their support for warfare and the death penalty.

You might believe violence in defense of the innocent would be justifiable, if it were an effective means to the end of stopping abortion. But–you might say–it isn’t: it just brings both the cops and public opinion down on the side of the abortionists, and hurts the movement to end abortion through orderly political means. But whether or not this is an accurate assessment of the strategic effects of anti-abortion violence–and I’m not sure that it is–it is not the reason that most pro-lifers who came out against Rudolph’s bombing campaign or Kopp’s murder-by-sniping gave for condemning them. It’s true that many pro-lifers said that they thought actions like these hurt the cause; but besides that, most of them also repeatedly made statements that anti-abortion terrorism is not only strategically foolish, but also morally wrong. Most of them seem quite earnestly to believe that folks like Eric Rudolph and James Kopp are murderers and dangerous lunatics.

But look. If you do think that Eric Rudolph is a dangerous lunatic–and I agree you should–then what can you think about someone who believes exactly what Eric Rudolph believes about abortion, and does not have any principled opposition to the use of force to defend the innocent, and yet, unlike Rudolph, sits back comfortably while doing absolutely absolutely nothing about it? Such a person would be a moral monster of the most wretched sort; perhaps less dangerous than Rudolph, but also even more contemptible. Yet this is exactly the condition that a very large segment of the anti-abortion movement seems to confess to every time they state their basic beliefs about abortion and acceptable political strategy.

Now, the point here is not, of course, to exhort anti-abortionists to take up arms and start shooting. My argument is a modus tollens, not a modus ponens. If you earnestly believe that abortion is murder and that violence in defense of the innocent is justifiable, but do nothing, then you are a moral monster. But principles of charity demand that you try to find some other way to understand a person’s actions, if any plausible candidate is available, other than a way that makes them a moral monster. In this case, the answer is: most people in the anti-abortion movement don’t really believe that abortion is murder.

No, they really don’t. They certainly believe that abortion is wrong. And apparently they believe that it’s wrong in a way that justifies State intervention to stop it. But they cannot honestly and consistently regard it as a violation of an innocent person’s rights just as bad as infanticide without being moral monsters even worse than the murderers they claim to deplore. Since I don’t think they are that, I conclude that they don’t honestly and consistently believe it as anything more than a rhetorical flourish.

Here’s some more reasons to think that this is true:

• Most anti-abortionists are roughly aware of the scale of abortion. And most of them say that it shows something is profoundly wrong with our society. But very few actually give any indication, in their language and in their actions, of genuinely believing that they are witnessing mass slaughter on such an unprecedented scale. Those who do talk this way–drawing comparisons to the Holocaust, for example–are mostly folks like Operation Rescue, Joe Scheidler, and further on out to the Army of God, who are marginalized or condemned as lunatic fringe elements.

• The fact that most anti-abortionsts do, as I mentioned above, seem to think that when Eric Rudolph bombed New Woman All Women seven years ago he did do something that was not only strategically foolish, but also morally wrong indicates that they are speaking either (1) as principled pacifists or (2) as people who believe that deadly force is not a proportional response to whatever is wrong about abortion. Since (1) clearly doesn’t apply for many, it seems that (2) is what they are best understood as believing. Yet if they believe (2), that just is a good reason to say that they don’t believe that abortion is murder–because if any threatened wrong would permit deadly force as a response, wouldn’t murder be it?

• Most anti-abortionists, even while claiming that abortion is murder and ought to be illegal for precisely the same reasons that infanticide is, very conspicuously shy away from claiming that the people primarily responsible for these murders–women with unwanted pregnancies who procure an abortion–should be punished like murderers are punished. Some (George H. W. Bush, for example) seem to believe that laws should only punish abortion providers and should not punish women who seek abortions at all; almost nobody other than those who already support violence against abortion providers argues that they should be imprisoned for life or executed. Yet if you honestly and consistently believe that these women are guilty of infanticide, then why would you call for the legal system to treat them at all differently from Susan Smith or Andrea Yates? Answer: most abortion opponents don’t honestly and consistently believe that they are guilty of infanticide; however wrong they may think abortion is, their sense of compassion compels them to treat women who seek abortions less harshly than they would ever treat a child murderer.

If what I have been saying is the case, then abortion opponents are better people than Eric Rudolph in spite of their bloody rhetoric of abortion-as-murder. But that also means that they need to give up the bloody rhetoric and they need to give it up now. It is a distortion of their views; they might regard abortion as cruel or tragic or irresponsible but if what I have been saying is true they do not earnestly and consistently think of it as murder. Worse, it’s a distortion of their views that places demands of them that their own sense of compassion and shame prohibits them from ever fulfilling. Nearly all pro-lifers realize that it would be inhuman to punish women who seek abortions as murderers, and that it is wicked to bomb clinics or shoot doctors. Yet to give reasons for seeing these things as wrong they must logically give up on the claim that abortion is murder. As long as they insist on hurling that rhetorical thunderbolt, they are committing their conscience to a principle that demands precisely the actions of an Eric Rudolph or a James Kopp, and they are giving truth to what Ani DiFranco mournfully sang, in the most heartbreaking and fitting commemoration of this day that I know, after the shooting of Dr. Slepian in Buffalo and the bombing in Birmingham:

and the blood poured off the pulpit
the blood poured down the picket line
yeah, the hatred was immediate
and the vengeance was divine
so they went and stuffed god
down the barrel of a gun
and after him
they stuffed his only son

–Ani DiFranco, Hello Birmingham

My Monday posts are, first and foremost, about historical memory. I conceived of them originally as an opportunity to knock knuckle-headed mythistory in a way that would be useful for the web community, because part of bringing our shared history into our living memory is a struggle against forgetting, especially in the form of covering over memory with comfortable falsehoods. Last week, though, I took a bit of a break in order to say some things about Martin Luther King Jr. and a history that most of us do know, even if only through a glass, darkly. This week, too, I’m changing the plan a bit; not to say anything, but to commemorate something that I have nothing to say about, because there are are no words.

This week, January 27, will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army.

Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, a limited and limiting bit of jurisprudence, yes, but also the Supreme Court’s landmark recognition–even if in a partial and problematic way–that women have a human right to control their own internal organs, including the reproductive ones. It’s sometimes frustrating that Roe is the ruling that we’re stuck having to defend, but January 22 is the jubilee day in which most abortion was decriminalized in every state in the U.S., and it is a good day to celebrate the remarkable story of the radical feminist movement. (You do know that it was radical feminists who organized the first abortion speak-outs and who drove the movement for abortion law repeal rather than weak health-of-the-mother reform, don’t you?) Roe was the capstone victory in a remarkable struggle that exploded, seemingly out of nowhere, with the first abortion speak-out in 1969, and transformed the lives of millions of women for the better over the course of 4 years. And if that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

In honor of the occasion:

• Most of what I want to say today are things that I’ve already said, in Happy Roe v. Wade Day!, April March, Why We Marched, and Pro-Choice on Everything, Part I.

• Digging even deeper into the archives, I can’t encourage you enough to give a read to Lucinda Cisler’s Abortion law repeal (sort of). It’s a remarkable, sometimes depressingly prescient, essay written four years before Roe, on the opportunities and dangers that lay ahead, and on the need to be consistent and completely unapologetic about abortion rights. It’s a woman’s right to control her body that’s at stake here, and there’s no excuse for letting anti-choicers Mau-Mau us into acting as if they had some kind of monopoly on moral discourse.

  The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

  …

  There are many reasons why a woman might seek a late abortion, and she should be able to find one legally if she wants it. She may suddenly discover that she had German measles in early pregnancy and that her fetus is deformed; she may have had a sudden mental breakdown; or some calamity may have changed the circumstances of her life: whatever her reasons, she belongs to herself and not to the state.

• Lauryn at Feministing exhorts:

  Hopefully you have some kickass events planned for the day, however, if Thursday’s festivities left you feeling like you have little left to celebrate, then take a moment to reflect on what you’re willing to do to for the reproductive rights movement.

  Whether it’s a commitment to start escorting at your local abortion clinic, writing a quick email to Congress, taking a pro-choice picture, making a donation, or posting on BushvChoice–just get busy.

  Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, encourages that: “We need to talk to neighbors around the kitchen table about the values of freedom and privacy; we don’t run away from the arguments. Our movement is on stronger ground when we take seriously the moral dimensions of the issue.”

• Of course Keenan is absolutely right that there is a moral principle here, and it’s one worth being unapologetic over. The Well-Timed Period makes that especially clear by offering us a harrowing history lesson. Criminalizing abortion is State violence against women. We must never go back.

• BlackFeminism.org marks the occasion by reminding that for all too many communities, Roe is only a slip of paper, since abortion providers have been run out by the bullies, the thugs, and the constant daily assault from reactionary state governments. Today is a day to celebrate what we’ve won; but it’s also a day to commit ourselves to a struggle that is far from over.

• And finally, L. reminds us of just how far we have come, and how important that struggle has been:

  So just do me a favor and thank dumb luck or the deity of your choice that you were born in an age of reasonably effective birth control and open, legal abortion Better yet, thank your mothers and your grandmothers, for what they forced into being and what they lived through, and admire their strength without being nostalgic for its necessity. You don’t have to wallow in any grim hypothetical details, though there are plenty to be had. Just pause for a few seconds and consider that, yeah, ok, it really is better this way.

Mythistory Monday is on a holiday break this week. Since today is the observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m inclined to take a bit of a break from knocking knuckle-headed distortions of history for a bit of a celebration of something that most of us know.

There is a lot to complain about in the way that Dr. King’s life and career have been handled–both in the uncritical hagiography that has been made of his life and also in the way that that same process has obliterated so much of his real thought and political commitments from living memory that even hard Rightists who spent their college years fighting the civil rights movement tooth and nail, or happily working alongside those who did, can now come back and claim to be speaking in Dr. King’s voice by piously intoning a few words snipped from a single sentence out of his most famous speech. There’s a lot to complain about, but for it all, there’s a hell of a lot to celebrate too. Underneath the television specials and the holy martyr imagery, there is a real man, who has been put on a pedestal, who has been abused, who has been ignored at the same time as he is piously invoked, but who, after it all, cannot be struck out of our memory and who remains a testament, in living memory, to what is possible for this world.

That’s what I want to remember today: the living Dr. King. No holy martyr, but a real person, a Black preacher who found himself in the midst of the most profound struggles of American history. In spite of his work with the Montgomery Improvement Association and in forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was always more of an agitator than an organizer–a maker of speeches and a preacher of sermons who often showed up late in the game for campaigns that others had started. He was frankly prone to showboating at times, and frustrating on more than one occasion for the men and especially the women who did the long, hard, thankless work of organizing in groups such as SCLC and SNCC–from Rosa Parks to Ella Baker to Bob Moses to Fannie Lou Hamer. And yet also an indispensible man–not just as a symbol, but as a thinker and an actor and a moral guide, who gave long years of his life to the struggle to end Jim Crow, who remained, through that struggle’s greatest triumphs and its darkest hours, in the face of agonizing doubt and the ugliest sorts of violence, to a new kind of nonviolent politics on behalf of freedom and compassion for all. We must avoid the lazy politics of invoking Dr. King’s name as a way to deride just revolutions or calls for forceful self-defense; we have to be careful about how we universalize the lessons of the Freedom Movement; but I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that the nonviolent politics that Dr. King and Ella Baker and others developed, drawing from and expanding on the past examples of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Sanger, and Mohandas Gandhi, is a force that has changed the world–and changed it for the better.

• Jason at Negro, Please links to his MLK Day post from last year, noting, sadly, that nothing relevant has really changed since he wrote it.

• David Grenier and Jeffrey Tucker remind us of Dr. King’s statement against the war on Vietnam:

  Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. …

  As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent….

  These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest….

  — Beyond Vietnam, 4 April 1967, New York City

• Rox Populi offers an MLK Random Reader, including:

  For nonviolence not only calls upon its adherents to avoid external physical violence, but it calls upon them to avoid internal violence of spirit. It calls on them to engage in that something called love. And I know it is difficult sometimes. When I say love at this point, I’m not talking about an affectionate emotion. It’s nonsense to urge people, oppressed people, to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. I’m talking about something much deeper. I’m talking about a sort of understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men.

  — Address at the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall, 23 June 1963

• Amazonfemme gives us this from Dr. King’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize:

  I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him.

  I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

  I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

  I believe that even amid today’s motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

  I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.

  “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.”

  I still believe that we shall overcome.

  — Acceptance Speech at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, 10 December 1964

• I close with two of my favorite quotes. Only one of them is by Martin Luther King Jr.; the other is about him:

  It is time to reorder our national priorities. All those who now speak of good will and who praise the work of such groups as the President’s Commission now have the gravest responsibility to stand up and act for the social changes that are necessary to conquer racism in America. If we as a society fail, I fear that we will learn that very shortly that racism is a sickness unto death.

  — Martin Luther King Jr., 4 March 1968

  And, on the subject of King’s real radicalism, and the role of radicalism generally in the struggle for justice, Malcolm X has this to say:

  I’ll say nothing against him. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King.

  — Malcolm X

• That first quote, by the way, I lifted from a remix of Dr. King’s speeches that I couldn’t possibly do justice to with a description. You really should listen to it.

All of these things happened while my parents were in college, not 40 years ago. Think of what Dr. King’s efforts, and the efforts of the countless heros–those whose names we know and the thousands of ordinary people who haven’t made it into the books or the teevee specials–have meant for the world in those few years. Yes, we are living through dark days, but think of what it was like just within living memory of today. As Dr. King put it: Let us remember that the arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I hope so. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.