Glenn Beck has said that Martin Luther King's dream has been "distorted." He's also said, "Damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment! We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place!" Yesterday, Beck held a "Restoring Honor" rally on the exact spot King delivered his famous speech, 47 years to the day in which it was given. I shit bricks.
MLK is famous for other things besides "I have a dream." He demanded that "President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, health care and decent homes.” He said "...we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars — and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power." However, in Beck's "An Inconvenient Book," he says that the poor cannot be helped because they are "lazy." He also thinks President Obama "really is a Marxist. He believes in the redistribution of wealth."
Martin Luther King was famous for being a very religious man. He was a reverend. It was his faith that motivated him to do what he did. He called himself an "advocator of the social gospel." He said that his movement's ultimate goal was "an age of social justice." Glenn Beck, on the other hand, has attacked churches that preach social justice. In fact, if you hear the words "social justice" at your church, you should "run, and don’t listen to anyone who is telling you differently." Because that's "Marxist." He really said this. But that's not the worst of it. He literally said that the civil rights demonstrators were in fact not "crying for social justice."
The biggest thing that separated King from more militant civil rights leaders like Malcolm X was that MLK believed that someone who opposed his views should be engaged with in respectful dialogue. In a 1957 sermon titled "Loving Your Enemies," King said that a man must “discover the element of good in his enemy, and everytime you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points.” When civil rights demonstrators were attacked by police and their dogs, King asked them not to fight back. Glenn Beck unapologetically ridicules his enemies. He has literally made fun of Barack Obama's 11-year-old daughter. Beck's asked if Barack Obama is the antichrist. He's compared Obama to Adolf Hitler. When Glenn Beck interviewed America's first elected Muslim congressman, he told him to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."
Glenn Beck is an absolutely terrible human being. He is either unable or unwilling to connect with the feelings of others. Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century. What Beck is doing is beyond insulting. It's sad. As Media Matters so eloquently put it, Martin Luther King would've been on Beck's chalkboard.
But wait a second. Why is Glenn Beck vying for peaceful resistance when the founders promoted violent revolution? Beck, you have the wrong civil rights leader. You're looking for Malcolm X. Hey I have an idea! Let's take a break from the blog real quick to match the quote with the founder who said it!*
*NOTE: One of these people was not actually a founding father of the United States.
1. "Give me liberty, or give me death!"
2. "If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary."
A. Malcolm X
B. Patrick Henry
Little known fact: In his Virginia Stamp Act Resolutions, Patrick Henry wrote "I will not rest until streets run red with the blood of the white man."
Here's an angry old person. Glenn Beck's had this guy on his show. He's a Thomas Paine "impersonator," but instead of spouting off the opinions of Thomas Paine, he spouts off neoconservative bullshit about taxation and brown people that would've made the real Thomas Paine shit his kidney.
Bonus points if you made it past a minute.
Let's see, in The Rights of Man, Paine wrote, "Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age."
In the same pamphlet, "It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread... pay to every such person of the age of fifty years ... the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty... This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right."
My goodness, did Glenn Beck know that he supports a Marxist?
In Agrarian Justice, Paine wrote that we should "Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."
Okay wait a second, that really is starting to sound like Marxism now oh fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
But at least we're still a Christian nation, ri-
"Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange believe that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies."
"Every phrase and cirsumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began to read."
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church."
"The adulterous connection between church and state..."
"There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice."
"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else."
"What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith."
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