Take down that flag and for the love of God turn off that Lee Greenwood. Independence Day is not about the United States. (There was no such country in 1776, before or after the Declaration; the Declaration only claimed to absolve the former colonies from any allegiance to the Crown.) Least of all is this a day for the government or for its loyalists. 4 July is for rebels and radicals.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it …. [W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

— Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

Jefferson, of course, claimed that the natural consequence of altering or abolishing government was to “institute new Government.” So much the worse for Jefferson (and especially for those whom he later came to govern), but that affects what’s entailed by the principles enunciated in the Declaration about as much as the fact that Jefferson pretended like he didn’t have a moral duty to immediately release his slaves from bondage affects the fact that the Declaration’s defense of complete equality and inalienable natural rights nevertheless condemned slavery beyond hope of appeal. Whatever Jefferson’s failings, his argument, if sound, is an argument against any form of coercive government whatsoever. If indeed we do have the “right to alter or abolish” government–any government–in virtue of our right to withdraw our consent to their authority, and we retain that right as free human beings no matter what institutions we may have been born into or roped into, then no government can ever rightly demand our allegiance against our will; we are, all of us, free to withdraw that allegiance and (thereby) remove ourselves from any obligation to any government at any time. The only question that remains is whether that right to alter or abolish government is a right that belongs to each of us, individually, or a right that has to be exercised collectively (by some group of us acting together). But if our right to refuse government authority derives from (1) our birthright to equal station as sovereign individuals, and (2) the natural and unalienable rights that follow from that, then it’s hard to see how these individually held rights could entail anything less than an individual right, as the political equal of any puffed-up prince or president on Earth, for you, personally, right now, to sever all political connections if you want, and to tell your would-be rulers just where they can go promulgate their law.

Over at Catallarchy they’ve been singing the praises of flag-burning. I might be more enthusiastic about it if I thought the flag were really the problem; but, aside from being even uglier than most of the world’s military colors, there’s not too much harm that you can say the flag itself has really done. But flags aren’t all that you can burn. Here’s how William Lloyd Garrison, for example, marked the occasion 151 years ago today, when Boston was outraged by the use of armed federal troops to force Anthony Burns back into Southern slavery:

The rally began with a prayer and a hymn. Then Garrison launched into one of the most controversial performances of his career. To-day, we are called to celebrate the seventy-eighth anniversary of American Independence. In what spirit? he asked, with what purpose? to what end? The Declaration of Independence had declared “that all men are created equal … It is not a declaration of equality of property, bodily strength or beauty, intellectually or moral development, industrial or inventive powers, but equality of RIGHTS–not of one race, but of all races.

—Massachussets Historical Society, July 2005

We have proved recreant to our own faith, false to our own standard, treacherous to the trust committed to our hands; so that, instead of helping to extend the blessings of freedom, we have mightily served the cause of tyranny throughout the world. Garrison then spoke about the prospects for the success of the revolutionary spirit within the nation, prospects he regarded as dismal because of the insatiable greed, boundless rapacity, and profligate disregard of justice prevalent at the time. He concluded his speech by asserting, Such is our condition, such are our prospects, as a people, on the 4th of July, 1854! Setting aside his manuscript, he told the assembly that he should now proceed to perform an action which would be the testimony of his own soul to all present, of the estimation in which he held the pro-slavery laws and deeds of the nation …

— from Thoreau: Lecture 43, 4 July, 1854

Producing a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law, he set fire to it, and it burst to ashes. Using an old and well-known phrase, he said, And let all the people say, Amen; and a unanimous cheer and shout of Amen burst from the vast audience. In like manner, Mr. Garrison burned the decision of Edward G. Loring in the case of Anthony Burns, and the late charge of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis to the United States Grand Jury in reference to the treasonable assault upon the Court House for the rescue of the fugitive–the multitude ratifying the fiery immolation with shouts of applause. Then holding up the U.S. Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all the other atrocities,–“a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,”–and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen! A tremendous shout of Amen! went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few hisses and wrathful exclamations from some who were evidently in a rowdyish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular feeling.

–from The Liberator, 7 July 1854 (boldface added)

Happy Independence Day.

Tom DiLorenzo has made a pretty steady gig for himself in lodging criticisms — mostly just ones — against the federal government’s conduct in the Civil War and against Abraham Lincoln in particular. But the tenor of his comments and his comments about similar crimes by leading lights of the Confederacy has led to some accusations that he seems to be motivated by a dishonestly-supported fetish for Dixie at least as much by concerns about the historical Lincoln. Lately he decided to prove these charges wrong, once and for all, with the following modest proposal:

re: Greatest Americans

Perhaps we should start a list of politically incorrect greatest Americans. I’ll begin by nominating Robert E. Lee, who brilliantly led the Army of Northern Virginia in its war of secession against the empire.

Virginia originally voted to stay in the union, after the lower south seceded, and re-voted (by popular vote as well as by its legislature) only after Lincoln began his invasion of the southern states. Lee turned down command of the Union Army, which was offered to him, to defend his home country against foreign invaders. He also personally liberated the slaves his wife had inherited, something Ulysses S. Grant did not get around to until he was forced to do so by the 13th Amendment in 1866.

(This should cause the politically-correct liberventinists to start cackling like a flock of hens).

Now, my opinions about Robert E. Lee may be different from Tom DiLorenzo’s. (If I were going to make a list of politically incorrect greatest Virginians, I would suggest Gabriel Prosser or Nat Turner long before the pro-slavery, anti-secession, statist warrior Lee.) But whatever our differences may be, what I want to remark on here is that DiLorenzo’s description of Lee contains a documented factual error. I know about it, and he knows about it; I know that he knows about it because I wrote him about it a week ago:

To: Thomas DiLorenzo
Subject: Like a flock of hens, indeed.
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005

In “re: Greatest Americans”, you recently claimed:

Perhaps we should start a list of politically incorrect greatest Americans. I’ll begin by nominating Robert E. Lee, who brilliantly led the Army of Northern Virginia in its war of secession against the empire. … He also personally liberated the slaves his wife had inherited, …

But this is not true. Lee’s wife did not inherit any slaves and Lee did not “liberate” them. Lee did gain temporary control over 63 slaves after the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, but Custis freed the slaves in his will and Lee was legally obligated to process the manumission papers within five years of his death. (You can find a copy of the will at [1].) In fact, after hiring the slaves out to other plantations for the five years he finally released the slaves in the winter of 1862 and formally filed the manumission papers on December 29, 1862 [2], five years, two months, and nineteen days after his father-in-law’s death.

To suggest that Lee deserves any credit for the emancipation when the terms of the will legally mandated it, and when he held the slaves in bondage for his own profit as long as he was legally able to do so, is either misinformation or disinformation; in either case it should not have been printed and ought to be publicly corrected.

Sincerely,
Charles Johnson

DiLorenzo didn’t mention this point in his later posts to the LRC Blog, exactly, but he did go on to prove his objectivity by explaining that Lee could not be blamed by anti-state, anti-war, pro-market libertarians for his role in the imperial war against Mexico because doing the right thing would have been personally costly and possibly dangerous, and to suggest Jefferson Davis as the candidate for the state of Mississippi.

Still, it is important that these facts see the light of day. I wrote yesterday in praise of direct action over lobbying, and since DiLorenzo’s public correction doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, I suppose that I will have to take matters into my own hands.

Lee did not free a single one of the slaves that he gained control of after his father-in-law’s death. Custis emancipated them in his will; Lee just enacted the terms of Custis’s will, as he was legally obligated to do as its sole executor. Lee also happened to keep control over those 63 slaves for as long as he could legally get away with it and sent them, for his own profit, to be forced to work on neighboring plantations and in eastern Virginia. To credit Lee with liberating enslaved people, when it was his father-in-law who freed them, and Lee who kept them in bondage as long as he felt that he could, is disingenuous, and the statement ought to be retracted.

Further reading:

• GT 2005/01/03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves
• No Treason 2004/10/19: DiLorenzo Responds
• No Treason 2004/10/18: Speaking of Slavery
• No Treason 2003/05/18: Making a Fetish of the Confederacy at LewRockwell.com

The Seventh Annual Southern Girls Convention will be held June 17-19, 2005, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Every year for the past 6 years, the Southern Girls Convention has brought out hundreds of rad folks to meet and to talk and to learn from each other–learning skills for activism and everyday life, sharing our experiences organizing deep in the heart of the so-called Red States, and taking it home to raise hell and work together to make our homes freer, safer, more just, and more loving places to be. It’s a place for Southern women and pro-woman activists to find each other, get together, work out our plans and our priorities, and begin to build the communities we want to live in in our own hometowns.

SGC is an unapologetically feminist, bottom-up, grassroots meeting. Each year it’s held in a different Southern community and put together with a new set of local organizers, working together with organizers from years past (if you didn’t know, I’m one myself; together with my friends Claire Rumore and Ailecia Ruscin, I helped put on the third annual Southern Girls Convention, which drew about 600 radical activists to Auburn, Alabama). The convention’s been held in Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Auburn, Alabama; Athens, Georgia; and Asheville, North Carolina; last year it returned to its birthplace in Memphis, and this year the seventh annual Southern Girls Convention will be held on June 17-19, 2005, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We’re working to reconnect with the radical history of the American South–the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the Klan, yes, but also–lest we forget–the home of the modern Civil Rights movement, the birthplace of SNCC, and the home of women like Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Elaine Brown, Casey Hayden, Rita Mae Brown, and others. We’re working to build an infrastructure for women’s liberation in the South — because the South is our home, it needs to change, and by God we’re the ones to do it.

There will be a weekend of workshops and social events for sharing skills, learning from each other about issues and campaigns, and just meeting and talking and networking (as they say) with each other. There will be music shows, free food, and a talk by bi feminist artist Magdalen Hsu-Li. There will also be childcare for children over the age of one, incidentally, and children will also be welcome in the convention space. Interested? Consider registering to attend. While you’re at it, if you have a skill you’d like to share or an issue or organization you’d like to talk with radical folks from across the South about, you should consider proposing a workshop! Part of the point of Southern Girls Convention is that we can all learn from each other; we don’t need professional activists coming in from the North to lecture us about how to organize ourselves. (N.B.: this doesn’t mean that professional activists from the North will be unwelcome at SGC; if you are one, we’d love for you to come. Just don’t expect it to be all about you!)

Here’s the announcement from this year’s organizers. Be sure to spread the word to anyone you think might be interested!

We are counting on you to spread the word for us! Please forward this message to any friends, family, colleagues, bulletin boards, listservs, or web pages that might be interested in the event!

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Seventh Annual Southern Girls Convention

June 17-19, 2005 Baton Rouge, Louisiana

WWW: http://www.southerngirlsconvention.org/2005/

WHAT IS SOUTHERN GIRLS CONVENTION?

The Southern Girls Convention is an annual grassroots meeting for networking, organizing, educating, agitating, and activism, devoted to empowering women and girls in the South and furthering the struggle for social justice. Each year’s convention is hosted by a different Southern community and facilitated by local organizers. Past conventions have brought together hundreds of folks in Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Auburn, Alabama; Athens, Georgia; and Asheville, North Carolina.

This year’s convention will be heading as deep South as you can get: Southern Girls Convention invites activists from across the country to meet in BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA on the weekend of June 17-19, 2005. Hundreds of activists will meet for discussion, action, and entertainment devoted to building pro-woman community in the South.

WHAT CAN I DO THERE?

Southern Girls Convention is based around discussions, workshops, and presentations which give participants the opportunity to share skills, share ideas, discuss important issues, organize campaigns, and have fun as a community. All workshops are organized and facilitated by the participants themselves–that means you! Other events will include a talk by Southern bi feminist musician MAGDALEN HSU-LI, an “un-shop” swap meet, nightly music shows, and tables for participants and organizations to display information, zines, art, and things they have made.

SGC also allows hundreds of activists from across the country to meet, network, strategize, and organize in their efforts on behalf of social justice. Feel free to bring video projects, zines, writing, and anything you are interested in sharing to the convention.

Childcare will be available at the convention space.

Past workshops at SGC have included:

• Group discussions on fatphobia, abortion rights and access, radical parenting, “100 Years of Revolutionary Wimmin,” the criminalization of women, “Queer and Trans Youth in the South,” gender bias in schools, sexism in the activist community, “Marginalization and Tokenization within the Grrrl Movement,” roles and strategies for boys in the struggle against male supremacy, and “Radical, Southern, and All Fired Up–Where Do We Go From Here?”

• Skill-sharing on radical cheerleading, community access television, gun safety and self-defense, workplace union organizing, screen printing, sexercises, Internet organizing, and how to start a consciousness-raising group.

• Organizing meetings for campaigns from Amnesty International, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and Planned Parenthood, and state-by-state caucuses for people to meet fellow organizers in their own area.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Website: http://www.southerngirlsconvention.org/2005/
E-mail: SGC’05 Organizers organizers@southerngirlsconvention.org

PLEASE FORWARD THIS E-MAIL FAR AND WIDE! Send it to friends and e-mail lists, post it on your website, blog, or bulletin board… we are counting on YOU to help us spread the word. A fresh copy of the e-mail can be sent from our website at: http://www.southerngirlsconvention.org/2005/spread-the-word

Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

Southern Girls Convention 2005 Organizers
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

I’m doing my part with this note and a banner at the top of the page. If you support SGC and can help out by forwarding an e-mail to activist groups you’re a member of, putting up a banner, posting on your website, or whatever you like, don’t hesitate to do so–or to get in touch with me or with the Baton Rouge organizers to see what you can do to help us out.

Further reading:

• GT 2002-07-24: SGC’02 rocks the South from Athens, Georgia
• GT 2001-07-27: Southern Girls Convention builds pro-woman community in the Deep South
• Southern Girls Convention: History
• Kate Zernike, New York Times 2002-07-22: Where a Southern Girl is also a Feminist
• Ashley Sayeau, The Nation 2004-11-18: Southern Ms.
• On a related note, see GT 2004-11-09: Dear Democrats, GT 2002-05-30: It’s Time To Stop Blaming the South, GT 2001-11-14: And the other shoe drops, GT 2001-03-16: Anti-Southern Bigotry and Elitist Yankee Faux Liberals

Nobody likes to have an abortion, and nobody would like to have one even under the best of conditions. Things are much better now than they were in the dark days of back-alley butchers; and they could be made much better yet if it weren’t for miles of punitive regulations and red tape made with the explicit purpose of making abortions harder for legally vulnerable women to obtain. But even without the cultural bullies and screaming protestors, even without the government-imposed cartel costs and the intense curtailment of options for procedures, your choices would still in the end be between invasive surgery of some form or another or drugs that make you nauseous and bleeding over the course of a few days. Of course abortion is not the horrendous experience that anti-choicers repeatedly make it out to be; it is far safer and quicker and easier on both patient and provider than nearly every other kind of surgery that there is. It’s safer and less psychologically taxing than giving birth. (Somehow these comparisons don’t seem to get made very often by either the anti-choice leadership or their foot soldiers. How strange.) But root canals are very safe and relatively simple too; that doesn’t mean that anyone is excited to have one.

But so what? Nobody goes around talking about the terrible tragedy of root canals either, or about the need to reach across the divide to unite with the anti-root-canal community (I take it that there are some Christian Scientist types who oppose dental surgery out of deeply felt religious conviction) in order to prevent unwanted tooth decay. Nobody feels the need to prefix every remark about their support for the right to get a root canal with a half-hour of qualifications and apologies. Yet the Party Hack wing of the Democratic leadership seems to have decided, yet again, that this is just what they need. Here, for example, is how Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest political triumphs for women’s liberation in recent history:

In a speech to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters near the New York State Capitol, Mrs. Clinton firmly restated her support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. But then she quickly shifted gears, offering warm words to opponents of legalized abortion and praising the influence of “religious and moral values” on delaying teenage girls from becoming sexually active.

There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate — we should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished and loved, Mrs. Clinton said.

Her speech came on the same day as the annual anti-abortion rally in Washington marking the Roe v. Wade anniversary.

…

Mrs. Clinton, widely seen as a possible candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, appeared to be reaching out beyond traditional core Democrats who support abortion rights. She did so not by changing her political stands, but by underscoring her views in preventing unplanned pregnancies, promoting adoption, recognizing the influence of religion in abstinence and championing what she has long called teenage celibacy.

She called on abortion rights advocates and anti-abortion campaigners to form a broad alliance to support sexual education — including abstinence counseling — family planning, and morning-after emergency contraception for victims of sexual assault as ways to reduce unintended pregnancies.

We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women, Mrs. Clinton told the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Most of this is true enough, as far as it goes. Nobody wants abortion instead of widesperad contraception and responsible sexual education. Nobody likes to get an abortion. And in the present political and cultural climate, all too many women are made to feel far worse about their decision to have an abortion than should be. Fine. But the latter isn’t an unchangeable given; it’s a political fact that is enforced by a constant and intentional climate of harassment and intimidation. And the fact that we’d rather women were able to avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place is no reason to spend hours hand-wringing over it and apologizing for it unless you already think that there’s something wrong with getting an abortion. But why should you think that?

Actually, there is one other reason that you might do all that hand-wringing. You might be cavilling in spite of your own beliefs because you think that kind of dissembling is politically useful. I hate to say it about Hillary — she gave such a great speech at the March and all — but it’s hard to know what else to conclude about this particular strategy:

Mrs. Clinton’s address came as the Democratic Party itself engages in its own re-examination of its handling of the issue in the wake of Senator John Kerry’s loss in the presidential race.

Democratic senators such as Harry Reid of Nevada and Dianne Feinstein of California have also pressed for a greater focus on reducing unintended pregnancies, and some Democratic consultants have urged that party leaders mint new language to reach voters who identified moral values as a top issue for them in last November’s election.

Jesus Christ people. Look. No. Just, no.

First, you’re not trying to mint new language. You’re repeating the same crap that you did for the past 12 years. Here, for example, is how Electable John Kerry answered questions on abortion during the second and third debates:

Mr. Schieffer Senator Kerry a new question for you. The New York Times reports that some Catholic archbishops are telling their church members that it would be a sin to vote for a candidate like you because you support a woman’s right to choose an abortion and unlimited stem call research. What is your reaction to that?

Mr. Kerry I respect their views. I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views, but I disagree with them, as do many. I believe that I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith. I believe that choice, a woman’s choice is between a woman, God and her doctor. And that’s why I support that. Now I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade. The president has never said whether or not he would do that. But we know from the people he’s tried to appoint to the court he wants to. I will not. I will defend the right of Roe v. Wade.

Now with respect to religion, you know, as I said I grew up a Catholic. I was an altar boy. I know that throughout my life this has made a difference to me. And as President Kennedy said when he ran for president, he said, I’m not running to be a Catholic president. I’m running to be a president who happens to be Catholic. Now my faith affects everything that I do and choose. There’s a great passage of the Bible that says What does it mean my brother to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead. And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people. That’s why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith. But I know this: that President Kennedy in his inaugural address told of us that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own. And that’s what we have to – I think that’s the test of public service.

And before that in the second debate:

DEGENHART: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person?

KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I’m a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can’t take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can’t do that.

But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society.

But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.

Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro-abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don’t deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can’t afford it otherwise.

That’s why I think it’s important. That’s why I think it’s important for the United States, for instance, not to have this rigid ideological restriction on helping families around the world to be able to make a smart decision about family planning.

You’ll help prevent AIDS.

You’ll help prevent unwanted children, unwanted pregnancies.

You’ll actually do a better job, I think, of passing on the moral responsibility that is expressed in your question. And I truly respect it.

Apparently the apparatchiks have decided that there isn’t enough hand-wringing and pandering to the sensibilities of the Religious Right there. I don’t know how you could add any more hand-wringing and searching for “common ground” with the Christian Right there without the references to a woman’s right to an abortion disappearing entirely, but there you have it.

Guess what? It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Why in the world do they think that it would? Are they trying to win votes from the Christian Right? Do they honestly think that moving the political debate over reproductive freedom back from abortion to the Sanger-era fights over birth control and sex education is going to improve the political climate in this country?

In other words: stop treating the right to abortion like you treat free speech rights for the Klan. If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with abortion then quit hemming and hawing forever about how much you respect the position of people who do and how much you’d like to work with them on birth control. You’re wasting your time: a lot if not most ofthem also hate birth control and sex education anyway. And in the process of wasting your time you are also dissembling about your real motives and spitting on women’s struggle for freedom.

Incidentally, Rox, among the reasons I like Howard Dean as much as I do is that in the heat of an election, this is how he answers a question about abortion:

Diane Rehm: We have seen reports that builders across the country are refusing to participate in the construction of Planned Parenthood buildings. What would you do about the threats to freedom for a woman to choose?

Howard Dean: Well, I think that’s a very dangerous game those builders are playing, especially in the city of Austin, which is where it’s going on. Were I down there I would immediately refuse to do business with any of the contractors who were boycotting that. So all groups can play that game; you have the right-wingers playing the game today, but other groups who may disagree with that can also play that game. And I think that’s a mistake for them to do that.

I am pro-choice. I’m a doctor; I frankly believe that it’s none of the government’s business to interfere in a woman’s making decisions about her own healthcare. And I tend not to be very supportive of efforts to enforce political points of view on individuals’ healthcare, and that’s what’s going on in Austin, Texas.

— On the Diane Rehms show, WAMU, 2004-12-01 10:00am (they don’t seem to have a transcript; the question is around 45’45” on the audio version)

Elsewhere he’s also directly, and without apology or cavil, taken on both parental consent restrictions and late-term abortion bans, and pointedly insisted that on the issue of abortion, We can change our vocabulary but I don’t think we ought to change our principles..

Second, even if this were a new tack, and even if there were any reason to believe that it would get anything worth accomplishing accomplished, why would you think that women’s control over their own bodies is an acceptable bargaining chip? Women are not pawns to be sacrificed for better board position. Lots of Democrats bolted the party in the late 1960s to become Republicans because the national leadership would no longer keep silent about Jim Crow and the efforts of efforts such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party finally broke the Eastland-Wallace white supremacist stranglehold on the Southern state parties. That lost the Democrats a lot of voters. The difference even lost them several elections. So what? Does anyone think that it would be a good idea to endlessly fret about how to reach out across the divide and find common ground to bring the Klan vote back into the party?

To hell with that. If you’re going to get hung up on winning political office, this is not how you should be trying to do it. Falling back on the apparatchiks and electable candidates using electably mealy-mouthed rhetoric doesn’t work and it wouldn’t have gained anything worth winning even if it did. Meanwhile, the other side won’t believe it, your side won’t pull out the stops for you, and the people in the middle won’t know where the hell you actually stand.

If Democrats are looking for new language with which to frame the abortion debate, I’d like to suggest a good old standard: ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY.

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.