| The Case At Hand: Other Good Stuff, First
Comes now Kyle-Anne Shiver at the National Review to perform the honors. Matthew Yglesias already has a well-crafted takedown citing the National Review's record of demonizing King, including their screed when he won the Nobel Peace Prize (Oliver Willis I), a move replicated by the Wall Street Journal when Gore won the same prize, some 40-odd years later (Oliver Willis II, linkiing to Krugman). Plenty of good stuff to be found down that path, so do look into it. But I want to fill in a different part of the picture.
The Case At Hand: The Combination Shot
Yglesias excepts this gem-like passage from Shiver that captures the very essence of the combination shot:
By all measures, Martin Luther King Jr. was a true leader. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is just another politician - one who has demonstrated far more regard for the interests of teacher unions than for the children they are paid to serve, far more regard for the pro-abortion lobby than for the future of the black community, and far less good sense than the average person has when it comes to picking a spiritual mentor.
The positions and values of Senator Obama stand mightily against those espoused, and what's more, practiced, by Martin Luther King Jr. Based on all these considerations, I think it is quite probable that King, were he alive today, would not vote for Barack Obama.
And, indeed, one need not look at any more of Shiver's blather to get the big picture here. Indeed, the combination shot is contained in seed form in the first sentence and a half. King = "true leader" Obama = "just another politician." Of course, since King is the only American currently honored with his own national holiday, one might suspect that just about any politician might suffer in comparison, but just any politician would not be a prime target for the objectively racist combination shot. Only black politicians, with a few very rare exceptions, will do.
So let's take this little gem-like package apart a little bit, shall we? It's a summary of the arguments Shiver has presented earlier in her article. Rather than get bogged down in a great deal of detail, my point here is keep our focus on the combination shot template.
The first thing to note is that Barack Obama is the overwhelming favorite of the black community, with approximately 90% support in polls. So by playing the combination shot against Obama, she is also playing it against the black community as well. Furthermore, the positions he takes on private school vouchers and abortion rights are shared by the vast majority of America's black poltical leadership. So Shiver is also using the combination shot against all of them as well.
The second thing to note is that two of the issues she raises-about private school vouchers and abortion-were not issues that King dealt with. They were not political issues at all at that time. So here entire argument on these two points are essentially conjecture. We'll get to the third issues below.
The third thing to note is that Shiver essentially assumes that Obama's position must be corrupt. She allows for no possiblity that he may honestly and sincerely disagree. This was, of course, precisely the position that conseravatives before here held toward Martin Luther King. She further assumes that King would have agreed with her, and that doing so constitutes King being "a true leader," even though he had nothing to do with such issues.
The fourth thing to note is that she tries-through selective quotation-to present Martin Luther King and Reverand Jeremiah Wright as polar opposites, when in fact they extremely close to one another in their teachings.
Because this last point is the only one on which we have clear documentary evidence, it is the one I would like to take up first.
King and Wright: Peas In A Pod
In her article , Shiver writes:
And I don't believe I've ever been in any Christian church that was as far afield of traditional Christianity as is Trinity United.
I simply cannot, for the life of me, imagine King standing in his pulpit, hollering profanities aimed at the United States of America.
Jeremiah Wright: God bless America? No, no, no!
I say, God damn America!
For killing innocent people.
It says that right here in the Bible.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Rather than take a broad, and generally unrelated statement from King, why don't we look to see what he himself had to say about America's conduct and its relationship to God, and compare it to what Wright actually said? That is, after all, the only reasonable way to see how much they differ or agree.
Here is Wright's statement in context:
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
And here is King, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam" --Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967:
And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."
Surprisingly similar, no? Both men speak to America like the Hebrew prophets of old, and like those prophets, their overwhelming concern is for social justice.
The Abortion Canard
In her article, Shiver tries to enlist King against abortion rights on two counts, both deeply dishonest. First, she relies heavily on a King relative, a neice, Alveda King, whose views she tries to subsitute for Kings himself, and second, she tries to portray abortion as an attack on the black community, even calling it "genocide"-quite typical of anti-choice crowd's fundamental reliance on lies. Needless to say, King himself took no position on abortion, so all this is a red herring at best. But it's worth examing in more detail, because it shows the degree of lying, misrepresentation and confusion involved
Shiver relies heavily on Alveda, using emotion-laden passages such as the following:
As Alveda King passionately explains, the crime of abortion is quite akin to slavery: "How can the 'Dream' survive if we murder our children? Every aborted baby is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. In the hands of the mother is the fate of that child - whether that child lives or dies."
In other words, black women are white slaveowners, right? In fact, Shiver's whole attack has the subtext of black women not being trusted with their own bodies, and needing someone else to police them. Now, where have we heard that before? When castigating black welfare mothers, perhaps? "Babies having babies", perhaps? This is, quite simply, a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't proposition. To call this subtext virtually universal among white supremacists and movement conservatives would be like saying "water is wet." Surprisingly enough, there is not a whole lot of textual evidence that Martin Luther King shared such views, which systemically demonize over half the black population.
Furthermore, if Alveda King's beliefs are truly a reflection of Martin Luther King's teachings, and a witness to what he would say, were he alive today, then how do we account for the fact that Alveda King herself admits she had two abortions? (One supposedly without her consent.) How exactly was it that MLK's influence suddenly switched on after her second abortion, but not before?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Inquiring minds are also not exactly inclined to take Alveda King's word about anything, since she-unfortunately, rather typically-feels free to lie when it comes to arguing against abortion. For example, in the article linked to above, she says:
I immediately became a breast-cancer candidate just from that abortion because if you take a healthy baby and a healthy mama, and you remove the baby, the [hormone] system goes crazy."
Ah, but the National Cancer Institute says, not so much:
Introduction
A woman's hormone levels normally change throughout her life for a variety of reasons, and these hormonal changes can lead to changes in her breasts. Many such hormonal changes occur during pregnancy, changes that may influence a woman's chances of developing breast cancer later in life. As a result, over several decades a considerable amount of research has been and continues to be conducted to determine whether having an induced abortion, or a miscarriage (also known as spontaneous abortion), influences a woman's chances of developing breast cancer later in life.
Current Knowledge
In February 2003, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) convened a workshop of over 100 of the world's leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk. Workshop participants reviewed existing population-based, clinical, and animal studies on the relationship between pregnancy and breast cancer risk, including studies of induced and spontaneous abortions. They concluded that having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman's subsequent risk of developing breast cancer. A summary of their findings, titled Summary Report: Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer Workshop, can be found at http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/ere-workshop-report.
The Genocide Canard
Shiver's second argument is that blacks have a much higher abortion rate than whites, and that this constutes "genocide":
Perhaps if Barack Obama took the opportunity to hear Alveda King, MLK's niece, speak on the genocide that abortion has inflicted on the black community, he might have a change of heart; but as it stands now, Obama has embraced the most radical pro-abortion views of any post-Roe presidential candidate. Considering Obama's claim to share King's Christian faith, this seems quite extraordinary.
Yet more typical anti-abortion lies, some explicit, others implicit. First, Obama's pro-choice stand is essentially no different from that of all Democratic post-Roe presidential candidates. It's just that, for a good chunk of anti-abortion activists, whoever the Democratic candidate happens to be, they always seem to have "the most radical pro-abortion views". The reason for this claim is seldom, if ever, spelled out, and Shiver is no exception to this rule.
Second, abortion is not genocide. The attempt to equate the two is simply indicative of the profound intellectual dishonesty on which the anti-abortion movement is founded. Genocide is the intentional destruction of one people by another. Or, to be more precise, as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains:
The term "genocide" did not exist before 1944. It is a very specific term, referring to violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group. Human rights, as laid out in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concern the rights of individuals.
In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of the European Jews. He formed the word "genocide" by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. In proposing this new term, Lemkin had in mind "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." The next year, the International Military Tribunal held at Nuremberg, Germany, charged top Nazis with "crimes against humanity." The word "genocide" was included in the indictment, but as a descriptive, not legal, term.
With the Big Lie out of the way, we can now turn to the big deception-misrepresenting the significance of higher abortion rates among blacks.
This is how Shiver misrepresents it:
For more than a decade, abortion numbers among whites have been falling, but numbers for blacks continue to rise. MLK would certainly take notice of this.
As the Guttmacher Institute (statistical arm of Planned Parenthood) confirms, the abortion rate among blacks is three times that of whites and twice that of Hispanics. Abortion has become an incomprehensible, self-inflicted wound for the black community.
Ummm, not exactlty, as Dr. Melissa Gilliam explains:
As an African American woman, a physician, and a reproductive health specialist, I see on a daily basis the real-life consequences of unequal access to good health care.
That's why I strongly believe that those professing concern for the well-being of African American women have an obligation to put the issue of abortion in its proper context, and to support evidence-based policies that would have a positive impact.
Behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. African American women have higher abortion rates than their white peers because they have much higher rates of unintended pregnancy--three times higher than those of white women. In other words, there is no need to resort to far-flung conspiracy theories to explain the higher abortion rate among black women.
But there's more to the story. Across the board, African Americans often have worse sexual and reproductive health outcomes than people from other racial groups. For example, we experience much higher rates of sexually transmitted infections. These disparate rates reflect broader health disparities that can be seen in high rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease or cancer.
The root causes are manifold: a long history of discrimination; lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care; too few educational and professional opportunities; unequal access to safe, clean neighborhoods; and, for some African Americans, a lingering mistrust of the medical community....
Finally, Guttmacher Institute research shows that the abortion decisions of many women (of all races) are influenced primarily by their desire to be good parents. Too many women today are stretched so thin that they feel unable to take care of their existing children, not to mention an additional child. Clearly, policies that support working parents, especially at the lower end of the income spectrum, are needed. Let's make good on our pro-family rhetoric by supporting paid sick leave for more parents, as well as subsidized child care and affordable health insurance.
My challenge to antiabortion activists is to stop throwing around inflammatory terms like genocide and instead channel their considerable energies and resources into supporting policies that reduce the need for abortion. Let's get serious about helping women and their families, including women in the African American community.
Turning from abortion rates, which are a result of black women's conscious choice, responding to a wide range of considerations, which bears absolutely no relationship to genocide, let us take a brief look at something related, but quite different: infant mortality rates. Unlike abortion, infant mortality is something that women do not seek, and do not, generally, have control over. This is where state agency actually does begin to enter the picture, along the lines that can, ultimately begin to blur with genocide if the situation is sufficiently dire.
Without making the claim that such is the case in America today, it is nonetheless striking that the black infant mortality rate is more than double the white infant mortality rate. A May 2, 2007 press release on infant mortality from the Center for Disease Control reported:
Non-Hispanic black women had the highest infant mortality rate in the United States in 2004 - 13.60 per 1,000 live births compared to 5.66 per 1,000 births among non-Hispanic white women.
In terms of international comparisons, using the CIA factbook, and inverting it's worst-to-best ranking, this vast disparity translates to the difference between just a little worse than # 37, Italy (5.61) and #38, Isle of Man (5.62) for white women, and being right between #84, Grenada (13.58) and #85, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (13.62). Like the rates themselves, the internaitonal rankings these correspond with differ by a factor of more than two.
This difference in infant mortality rates is thus highly significant, it is related to state agency, and it is entirely absent from Shiver's supposedly deep moral concern about the welfare of the black community, as she seeks to position herself as siding with King against Obama. If ever there was a blatant intellectual fraud, then this is it-if, that is, one can call it "intellectual" at all.
Origins of Religious Right: Racism, Not Abortion
As if all the above were not enough, however, it's really only a prelude to the real story here, which is the racist origins of the religious right, which only adopted abortion as a cause out of political convenience-there just weren't enough out-and-out racists to sustain their movement. Thus, rather than the unsubstantiated claim of King being aligned against Obama's pro-choice position-a purely speculative invention on Shiver's part, we have the record of history that King's enemies actually played a crucial role in jump-starting the anti-abortion movement as a "grassroots" phenomena-the exact opposite of what Shiver is trying to argue.
I 've covered this before, in my diary, "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 1", where I quoted extensively from Max Blumenthal's article, "Agent of Intolerance" in The Nation magazine. Here is an excerpt from that diary:
Now we get to the good stuff:
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right's genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court's ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
Indeed, there was long a belief that life started with the first breath, just as God breathed the first breath-and his soul--into Adam. As Blumenthal goes on to explain, the Catholic right's concerns about abortion failed to interest White Southern Protestants for years to come:
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Because, of course, a Christian school could not be integrated.
Blumenthal continues:
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
Yep! "So-called" segregation!
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This ties in directly with the other topic I originally intended to treat at lengths, the school voucher canard-see below. But before we get to that, here's one last quote from Blumenthal from my earlier diary:
In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."
The School Voucher Canard
Okay, folks, I'm up to almost 4,000 words now, so let's cut to the chase: as indicated above, the school voucher movement, as a means to destory public education, also has strong historical roots in the white supremacist resistence to Brown v. Board of Education and its consequences. As Yogi Berra said, "You could look it up." Attempts to portray teachers unions as the enemy of black school children are as riddled with lies and distortions as attempts to portray abortion as genocide against black America. And the folks promoting both canards can be traced back the white supremacist resistence to Brown v. Board of Education.
The Objectively Racist Combination Shot--Conclusion
So, in conclusion, pulling back from the welter of details, what we have here is not one, but two social agendas with white supremacist roots being falsely associated with Martin Luther King, who then used rhetorically to attack Barack Obama.
As I wrote in the beginning:
One of the right's favorite racist moves developed over the past 20-30 years is combinaiton shot using Martin Luther King, Jr. After demonizing King throughout his life, and long afterwards (in the case of John McCain, on into the mid-1980s), many on the right realized it was time for a strategic repositioning. Instead of demonizing King, they would try to steal him. In doing so, one of the chief objectives was to use him against other blacks-both against the black radicals of his own time, and against contemporary black activists, politicians and anyone, really who got in their way.
At the same time that the present-day upstart is put down, King is simultaneous repositioned ever farther away from where he historically was, as well as from where his ideological descendents are today. This is the essence of the combination shot: the immediate target is "pocketed" and King re-positioned by an initial contact on the way to hitting the immediate object of attack.
Not only have I shown that this is true, I've added a broader view of what lies behind this dynamic, and shown that it has explicitly white supremacist roots. This is yet another demonstration of power of rightwing hegemonic narratives turning reality inside out, repositioning Dr. King as a would-be ally of his bitterest opponents. |
