Dr. Susan K. Smith is offended by comparisons between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kim Davis
reports Benny Huang, referring to the Kentucky clerk who has refused to sign any marriage licenses since the Supreme Court imposed same-sex marriage on her state.Smith, a pastor and “social justice advocate” (whatever that is) protested the invocation of St. Martin of Atlanta’s name to justify the deeds of a bigot like Kim Davis. “But I am angered by the claim that Ms. Dixon (sic) is acting as did Dr. King when he was thrown into jail for working to end racial injustice,” wrote Smith in a recent column at the Huffington Post. Dr. Smith is apparently so sloppy that she didn’t even get the clerk’s name right. Her name is Davis, not Dixon. “Ms. Dixon (sic) has been jailed because her God-sense tells her it is right and fitting to discriminate against people; Dr. King was in jail because his God-sense told him it was wrong to mete out injustice against anyone – especially blacks.”Related:
… I don’t generally like lawlessness. Liberals, on the other hand, celebrate lawlessness, which explains why they gave the lawless Martin Luther King a holiday and generally revere him as something of a demigod. I don’t believe he deserves a tenth of the deference we afford him which is why I must stress that Kim Davis’s obvious similarity to King is not necessarily flattering.
It is, however, accurate. Dr. Smith would know this if she’d ever read anything that King wrote. Has she? I don’t see how she could have read, for example, King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or his “Paul’s Letter to the American Christians” and concluded that King would oppose Kim Davis.
I think Dr. Smith falls into a common trap when evaluating King; that is, she creates in her own mind an image of the man as she wished him to be—a fighter for “justice,” as defined by Smith herself. It probably never occurs to her that King’s idea of justice might diverge from her own. In Smith’s mind it’s axiomatic that the mainstreaming of homosexuality and the crushing of dissenting voices are civil rights issues. As a champion for civil rights, MLK would certainly be on her side. Any attempt to counter her vision of King with the actual historical MLK is enough to raise her blood pressure.
Martin Luther King did not support same-sex marriage. Period. No one in pre-1968 America did, not even “gay” “rights” activists. (Their aim was to destroy the institution, not join it.) Nor did King find homosexuality morally acceptable. He was a mid-20th century Baptist minister with the accompanying moral code regarding sex. He claimed the Bible as his authority and the Bible is absolutely unequivocal on the subject of homosexuality. The fact that King had a plethora of mistresses and enjoyed an orgy every once in a while proves only that he was a hypocrite, not a “gay” “rights” activist.
King’s clearest public proclamations on homosexuality are found in an advice column he wrote for Ebony Magazine in 1958. When a boy asked his advice on how to handle feelings of attraction toward other males, King actually advised psychiatric treatment! He also referred to the feelings as a “problem.” Most importantly, King said that the boy’s attractions were “probably not an innate tendency.” In other words, he did not subscribe to the shoddy, unfalsifiable “born that way” theory. It doesn’t take much of a leap to infer that King would have rejected any comparison between race and homosexual conduct and would probably have been offended by it, as many blacks are even today. As they should be.
King did not march for homosexuals’ supposed “rights” because he did not see them as equivalent to his struggle against Jim Crow. He understood homosexuality as a behavior—and a deviant one at that. So if Kim Davis is a “bigot,” then Martin Luther King is a “bigot” too. What then is so outrageous about comparing the two?
… Kim Davis and Martin Luther King both defied the law for the exact same reason—because they considered themselves responsible to a higher power. (I’m not sure King really meant it, of course, on account of his incredible hypocrisy.) They both claimed that God’s law was superior to man’s law.
… On all of the key issues, King and Davis are of the same mind. Both oppose segregation. Both oppose homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and its accompanying imposition on people of faith. Both agree that they have an obligation to disobey any law that is unjust. Both measure the justice of a particular law by the standards of God.
Today, MLK Jr Would Be Unemployable in America, Given That He Would Be Anathema to Most Americans… of the Left (!)The other Davis: None Other Than MLK Welcomed Judgment, So Why the #$#%$@# Should We NOT Judge a Texas Democrat like Wendy Davis?!
… it isn’t judging that perturbs liberals so much; it’s other people judging according to criteria that liberals don’t like.
