Probing the life work of Dr. Martin Luther King

The legacy of MLK is rich with diverse causes and stages of activism, and yet he is painted with a broad brush today as a father and leader of the civil rights movement. That’s fair enough, for his heroic work set historic landmarks in recognizing human dignity and rights for all people.

But this kind of academic review of all his work and its direction provokes thought, and that’s a good thing. What did Dr. King do all his life, if not provoke thought about why we do what we do? So what are we celebrating in Martin Luther King? Conservatives and liberals see him differently, and yet he represented the values of both…at different times.

…there are three areas where conservatives can embrace King, and in fact where King’s views are more agreeable to conservatives than liberals. The first was his original grounding of his civil rights efforts in a vision of a nation that lives up to its Founding ideals and treats its citizens as individuals rather than ciphers defined by their pigmentation…

Second, King based his struggle on a moral and religious view that eschewed relativism. Indeed, his use of civil disobedience was predicated on his belief that one could distinguish between just human laws and unjust human laws, the latter consisting of those human contrivances which violated the “moral law,” the “natural law,” “God’s law,” or the “eternal law,” as King alternately put it. Yet the social thrust of liberalism today has as its foundation the dismissal of notions of absolute truth or the notion that human law must strive to meet some transcendent moral standard…

None of this is to say that King would be voting Republican today had he lived, although a few of his contemporaries are indeed doing so for just these reasons. It is to say that, on a number of matters that intersect with crucial public policy concerns today, King had views that logically underpin the conservative rather than the liberal position.

The piece is an academic argument taking in both the liberal and conservative aspects of King’s work, which is a good reminder in a culture that celebrates him today as a liberal pioneer. This is interesting:

If the conceptions of racial justice and the legitimate bounds of discourse widely insisted upon by the Left today were strictly applied to King, he would appear not as a seeker of justice but as a theocratic advocate of regressive color-blindness.

This is patently true.

Indeed, more than a few conservatives have been accused of exactly those sins for nothing more than advocating King’s original racial view or using King’s moral framework and language. Hence Senator Harkin’s outburst accusing President Bush of setting himself up as a “moral Ayatollah” when he vetoed the embryonic stem-cell bill on grounds that the bill did not conform to a higher moral law.

See the incoherence of the double-standard? Here’s an elaboration of it:

That voice of established stability known as the New York Times finds itself regularly terrified by the specter of encroaching theocracy because the anti-abortion, or anti-embryonic stem-cell research, or anti same-sex marriage rabble insist, like King, on operating in a framework that is not wholly secular. Consequently, it actually matters a great deal whether King and conservatives have something in common on these particulars. It matters even more whether they are right. Without knowing what justice and injustice are, and how to think or talk about them, we cannot give Martin Luther King, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, our veterans, or anyone else a day of honor.

And so on this day set aside to honor Dr. King, let’s consider the principle of justice, and its relationship to truth.