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| Family Research Council president Tony Perkins |
Earlier today, I made the following remark about Martin Luther King, Jr Day:
I need disinfectant to spray all of the folks & groups praising MLK knowing fully well they would disparage him if he were alive and presently support policies opposite to his beliefs.
Recent remarks posted by Tony Perkins of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council make me wish for a big can of disinfectant:
A lot has changed since Rev. King's life was cut short a half century ago. The man who would have turned 90 last week would notice a lot of his fingerprints on America's social progress. But he would also be deeply dismayed to see the number of people who've turned their backs on his greatest motivation: a deep and abiding faith in God. In all of the politically-correct retrospectives, we've lost perspective on how important religion was to the story of Dr. King and the civil rights movement.
. . . The leaders of the civil rights movement weren't transformational in spite of their faith -- they were transformational because of it. "I say [all of this]," Rev. King insisted, "as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen."
America's war against religious liberty would have saddened Dr. King. Like us, he knew that without it, he wouldn't have had the freedom -- or the platform -- to speak out against segregation. In his day as in ours, there is one path to reconciliation in this country: the church. "There is so much frustration in the world because we have relied on gods rather than God... Christianity affirms that at the heart of reality is a Heart, a loving Father who works through history for the salvation of His children. Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior."
Exploiting Dr. King's name to promote its quest of white evangelical "Christian supremacy" (disguised as a fight for "religious liberty") is rotten in itself.