Reflection on Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday Part Two

There is no telling what King would have thought of a consistent life ethic (CLE). But the feminist CLE is (dare I say) borne of the same impulse to embrace all, nonviolently.

In addition to expressing frank racism against him, some antiabortionists deride King as a "liar" and a womanizer who had extramarital affairs, even for hiring white prostitutes and beating them. Snopes.com does a good job of sifting through such criticisms and pointing out the high level of scurrilous urban legend in them. Especially the myth about hiring and beating white prostitutes--that sounds like a white segregationist's fantasy towards black women flipped around for the purpose of discrediting a black man!

Such antiabortionists, like P. Leslie Riley in his "Myths of Martin Luther King", excoriate the civil rights martyr for receiving the 1966 Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. Riley overlooks certain facts here.

--In his acceptance speech, King advocated family planning. Voluntary family planning is quite distinct from abortion and in fact is an actual human right and a nifty tool for preventing abortion. He said nothing here about advocating abortion.

--In 1966, Planned Parenthood itself was divided on abortion and still held an official public stance against abortion. It did so until the early 1970s.

--As documented in the book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, Margaret Sanger was not exactly the all-out babykiller of antiabortionist stereotype. She regarded abortion as a taking of unborn life caused by such atrocities as the denial of sex education and contraception to women. She want to prevent, not promote abortions, and therein lay her passion for family planning.

--Of course she--like many privileged or social-climbing whites of her day--held deplorable racist, ableist, and classist prejudices that contaminated her good work for family planning. King may not have known about these; in 1966 these were, as far as I know, were not a matter yet of widescale public knowedlege and scrutiny. And an article from the Fall 2001 issue of the Margaret Sanger Papers Projects Newsletter presents the complex and not entirely Sanger-damning evidence regarding the charge that she was out to exterminate the black race.

Fortunately prolifers, those inclined to expand their concern beyond the fetus, regard King as an ever-fresh source of inspiration and wish to build on his legacy. Even a group like Priests for Life, which is not keen on contraception, reprints his Letter From Birmingham Jail. Although King took an assiduously interfaith, inclusive perspective, the Letter recalls the example of Christians in early Rome who challenged the powers that be and "by their effort and example...brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests."

Clearly King can be termed prolife on the matters of infanticide and killing for public entertainment, just as he was obviously prolife on so much else. His position on family planning was, I believe, prolife, too. But he is not here any more to ask "What precisely did you mean by infanticide? Did you mean taking the lives of children before birth, too?" The term "infanticide" once had that double meaning, and in ancient Rome, Christians--like Jews, incidentally--were quite countercultural in rejecting abortion as well, as I discuss in the new anthology book Consistently Opposing Killing.

Aside from this, we have no evidence today of what King might have thought about abortion. But I feel it is a respectful building upon his legacy to affirm all lives, including the lives of vulnerable unborn children--and of course their mothers.

Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday Part One

As a US citizen, I am happy that the birthday of the martyred civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of our national holidays. But I am not happy with what many US whites make of him. I need to first be clear my standpoint: I personally am of Euro descent, although I hail largely from the more oppressed Euro ethnicities, the ones that have been referred to as "white n******." I have lived almost all my adult life in an urban, poor/working-class black neighborhood now threatened by gentrification, raised my child here, and my own household/family is interracial (black-white).

Too many white Americans look upon the establishment of King's birthday as a national holiday as a definitive proof that we have arrived at his Promised Land already...even as the struggle is far from over, even as they have not yet begun to unlearn the vast reservoirs of white privilege to which any white person in this society is heir, consciously or unconsciously, even the most wellintentioned white liberals (myself, alas, included).

White privilege remains intact as a big blinder to the ongoing struggles for economic and environmental justice, for peace in and outside black homes and neighborhoods, for self-respect and the healing of the deep psychological wounds that have accumulated down the 500 years that people of African descent have been in the Americas. It expresses itself in such plaints as "What are You People always so angry about, didn't you get what you wanted?" And in such deeds as the police's constant roughing up of my future son in law, who braids and do-rag and all has not a criminal deed to his name. Except the purported offense of Driving While Black, and that with a white woman, my daughter.

There is also a prevailing white view of King that sanitizes away his profound and prophetic radicalism. That Dr. King is not the Dr. King, for example, of the 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, nor the Dr. King commemoratedby the LGBT rights Soulforce in its dispatch Can You Hear Martin Luther King Today?

Soulforce recounts King on racism, militarism, and materialism. They do not speculate on his possible views of homophobia. All we can know today, really is that he stood by his friend and civil rights movement colleague Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and an openly gay man.

In the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, King speaks of being "moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart" and of the "many persons [who] have questioned me about the wisdom of my path... And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."

His vision of nonviolence was ever more-expansive; who knows today where it would have stopped, if anywhere? And being ever more expansive, it ran into the truisms and partititions of his time.

Which for me raises the question: What might King have made of a feminist, consistent life ethic?--Next Up.