MLK, Jr. and the right

There are people who are attempting to lay claim to the King legacy, saying it's an integral thread in the neoconservative fabric.

Dr. King must be rolling over in his grave.

David Neiwert, a freelance writer in Seattle, wrote on his blog an interesting entry concerning the right-as-in-wing wing's attempt to claim Dr. King as one of their own, and how it's just utter bullshit. These neocons are taking a good man and his good legacy and defacing them by trying to glue them to their own radical ideology in order to make it look better than it really is. It's a prime example of the sort of dirty tricks these revisionist historians will use.

This is a necessary trick if you want people to buy your faulty goods: Make it seem much better than it actually is. Salespeople do this expertly. To get you to buy their shit, they will either supplement their efforts with such Orwellian language as "previously owned", or just outright lie to you, or both. It's necessary to bend, revise, rewrite, or ignore reality to be neoconservative and have no qualms about it, which is one reason I dislike it so.

Dr. King was not among the people of faith who made enemies out of love and companionship; rather, he was among the people of faith who loved their fellow human beings. These people took the good aspects of their respective religions to heart in their quest to make sure that liberty, equality, and justice reigned. These people weren't stone-hearted (re)visionaries. They didn't portray people who were different from them as friends of the Devil and bedevil their pursuit of happiness. Rather, they embraced and accepted them as the human beings they were.

Sorry neocons, but Dr. King was a member of the Religious Left, not the Right.

— Athelwulf