MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY
I do believe in Martin Luther King.
It is everyone else that I don't believe in.
I do believe in non-violence.
Not one single bomb, not one bullet more than whatever
is made necessary by our oppressors, in order to get across the
message that our kind will not be degraded, dehumanized,
ignored, or exploited for political purposes.
This day ought to be uplifting, but it has become little more
than a glaring reminder of America's hypocrisy.
Every sweet-talking, sleazy used-car salesman of a politician
wants a piece of Martin Luther King.
It isn't just Mitt Romney, bragging that his Dad marched
with Martin.
It is people like former Congressman "B-1 Bob" Dornan,
who, when he wasn't busy battling with "lesbian spear-chuckers",
was bragging how he had marched with Martin Luther King, before
it was fa****onable.
Dornan also gave a keynote address and worked with the Family
Research Institute. This outfit is headed by Dr. Paul Cameron,
who calls gays "feces eaters" and suggested that gay men should
be exterminated.
I have also read that the Christian Coalition has had people on
its Board of Directors who advocated gay death penalty. Pat
Robertson himself once praised a book that included an open call
for gay death penalty.
This fact is not re****ted by the media. It does not stop the
media from acting like a Robertson endorsement is a feather-in-
the-cap. It also does not stop Martin Luther King's niece from
associating with the Christian Coalition, exploiting her uncle's
name, and questionably usurping his views, in her own, anti-gay
crusade.
When King died, he was not at the peak of his popularity. He was
starting to become depressed, because he was no longer as
effective. There were members in the African-American community
who called him unkind names, because they thought he was not
forceful enough, and was too accommodating of the white
establishment.
There are some aspects of his political views that can now be
debated, but one that cannot be debated seriously. If he were
alive, he would be speaking against the Iraq war, as he spoke
against Vietnam. He would be urging black soldiers to forego
military service- a thing that the military establishment could
not tolerate.
The President, and the CIA would have generated anti-King
propaganda, as surely as J. Edgar Hoover had done, lambasting
him as a fool and traitor who was supposedly not sup****ting our
brave troops. They would know everything about him, every
little human frailty. They would have used it against him, full
force. They would have exploited his ***ual indiscretions, to
lump him in with Bill Clinton, as a bad Christian example.
With a constant, negative barrage from the same people in the
media who now sing his praises, they would have probably
succeeded in rendering him an ineffective has-been. Only when
he is safely dead, and cannot agitate against any government
policies, can they help to create a myth, for purposes of
exploitation, to court votes, to make themselves sound righteous.
King had been inspired in part by Gandhi. There is mythology and
adoration of Gandhi in India, as much as the reverence of King in
the United States. Gandhi's face is on every denomination of
rupee.
For Gandhi, also, only when you make an in-depth effort to
understand the history of India and Britain- the real truth of
what happened, how and why it happened, do you start to the see
the role of mythology in distorting our concept of history.
We sugar-coat our memories. In the U.S, King stood out against
against a larger number of far more militant leaders- Malcolm X,
H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton.
We want to remember King's "I Have a Dream", but not Cleaver's
less-than-uplifting statement that "Raping a white woman is an
art-form."
It was only my second trip to a Gandhi museum in India that I
woke up to the full history of the struggle for India's
independence- how long it was, how bloody and violent it was.
Every schoolchild knows "Gandhi". Very few of them ever heard
of the Indian "Cult of the Bomb" in 1907.
Most Americans probably think that Gandhi came along with a
gentle twinkle in his eye, went on a few fasts, and the country
was freed, just like that, simple cause-and-effect.
From a tattered book, from the Gandhi Museum of Madurai, is
an overview of a long and violent struggle:
* The Coming of the White Man - 1498
* Mysore Resists - 1767
* The Sikh and Maratha Resistance - 1775
* The Volcano Erupts
* The First Shot - 1857
* The Revolt Spreads
* The Moderates and Extremists - 1900
* The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh - 1919
* The Cult of the Bomb
Of course Gandhi was loved. He was the antidote
to all that bloody history. He allowed Britain to save face, to
feel uplifted, instead of humiliated and defeated.
However, one of the key reasons why Gandhi's program worked was
that Britain was completely exhausted from the devastation of
World War II. They were not yet up for another round of
bloody fighting.
Without the violence, there is no appreciation of a lack of
violence.
Gays in India today can still get life in prison. For a country
that so adores Gandhi, is that the best sense of justice can be
managed? It proves the point- the love of Gandhi, and of King,
is mythology and hypocrisy of the highest order.
I also learned in India, from a retired doctor who was part of our
group, that both King and Gandhi got their inspiration from
Henry David Thoreau, the beloved, non-violent activist of
Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
At first, I didn't believe that claim, until I read and
researched, more. It turned out to be more demonstrably true
than I had imagined. King said that his first exposure to the
concept of non-violent civil disobedience was from Thoreau.
Gandhi spoke of how he had read Thoreau's works on civil
disobedience, while in South Africa.
Thoreau never married, and was rumored to be gay. It is another
piece of our history that has been permanently robbed from us.
Contributions from gays, through history, are denied.
India might still be an exploited colony, if not for the
influence of a gay man.
It is entirely possible, when black clergy sanctimoniously
"protect" marriage from being dirtied by gays, they are
not aware that segregation might still be alive
and well, if not for the influence of a gay man.
At one time, racists would have had the approximate
attitude that the flower of white womanhood would be
"defiled" by beastly black men, if interracial marriage
were allowed.
The incapacity of one minority to extend its experience
in degradation to another minority is part of why the myth
of Martin Luther King cannot be made to work for a minority
as small and ignorable as gays. There are certainly black
leaders who sup****t us, but the general ratio of sup****t
to bigotry is hardly adequate enough to redeem the
human race. This not simply true of race relations- it has
been true almost across the board, for minorities of
all kinds, in all times and countries.
It is not just India's life imprisonment for gays that makes me
doubt the value of Thoreau/King/Gandhi non-violence. It is much
closer to home, my native state of Ohio.
I read of a Christian mother from Ohio, who voted for the
Republican party, and against gay marriage. When asked about
Gandhi, she replied very sweetly, very sympathetically, that she
was very sorry that Gandhi had gone to Hell, because he was a
Hindu and did not believe in Jesus Christ.
Should we be imitating Gandhi, to try to impress a core
constituency of the Republican party, including such people who
think that Gandhi is in Hell?
The gay community has probably been more non-violent than any
similarly aggrieved minority. We have never brandished rifles
in the air. We have never had a "Cult of the Bomb".
We have not an iota of credit for that fact. We are instead
reviled as "militants", with calculated language from the
Christian Right such as that we are "assaulting" the Boys
Scouts - using a "figure of speech" to try to conjure up
an image of physical, violent rape.
Never before has a minority been so "militant", with petitions
and lawyer's briefs and filed legislation, or trying to build
grass roots coalitions with other minorities that loathe us.
Does the contrast of gay activists working peacefully
for change win any praise, in comparison to the world of
suicide bombers?
Absolutely none. It would not even occur to most Americans.
They feel aggrieved that they have to hear the word "gay"
spoken so much.
We have more than enough Gandhi and King wanna-be imitators.
They will not be embraced or publicized by the straight media
because the straight establishment is not in need of such a
figure, in order to quell the looming violence, because there IS
no looming violence. At least, so they imagine.
It goes against everything with which we have been indoctrinated,
every King statue, boulevard, museum or holiday ever named for
him, to make the contrarian suggestion that we need to make a
violent response before we can have an effective non-violent
response. That is a perfectly horrible philosophy. The only
possible thing that you can say in its defense is that
it is the truth.
Dare to be unpopular. Dare to think what you are not supposed
to think. The ugliness of violent upheaval is less than the
ugliness of unending degradation.
Tom Keske
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