Hundreds gather to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Associated Press
ATLANTA — Hundreds of observers, politicians and civil rights leaders crowded Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Ebenezer Baptist Church today to the celebrate the man whose legacy has now been celebrated for longer than he's lived.
King's nephew —Isaac Newton Farris, Jr.— noted the King Center has asked the nation to commemorate his birthday for 40 years —for more years than the civil rights leader lived.
He says:"We would be remiss if we did not commemorate Martin Luther King,Jr. a champion of peace in a time of war."
King was assassinated at the age of 39 on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He would have turned 79 this year.
King's actual 79th birthday was January 15, but the federal observance is recognized on the third Monday in January.
His widow — Coretta Scott King— worked for more than a decade to establish her husband's birthday as a federal holiday. King's birthday has been a national holiday since 1986, and is celebrated in more than 100 countries.
The holiday has been observed at Ebenezer Baptist Church —where King preached from 1960 until 1968— every year since his death. But it holds a new political significance this week because it falls closer to major primary elections than ever before, since many states moved the elections up to jockey for influence.
“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And thats what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary viewof how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”
This is the day after he crossed the Writer's Guild picket lines in California. As is becoming a common occurance this season, he pretended not to know they were on strike.
What a doofus! Can America stand two dim wits in a row?
Ann Coulter writes in her latest column, "Huckabee... fits their (liberals) image of what an evangelical should be: stupid and easily led."
So much for that 11th RayGun Commandment thing, huh?
As much as we hate to say it, The Slobber Goddess may actually have a point here. We've always thought the Huckster is kind of a nutbar and he has had a difficult time handling anything but softballs in the so called debates.
And face it, haven't we had enough fun with Bush and Dick? President Huckabee? I don't think so.
The Democratic Party could do worse than having Mike Huckabee win the Republican nomination. The nation could do much better.
I truly cannot begin to express how profoundly exhausted I am with election stories about religion, in no small part because they are getting sillier and sillier--and this is surely the silliest yet: Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, asks in an upcoming article, ''Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?''
I mean, this is to what our national political dialogue has been reduced by these idiots. Rather than teasing out the flaws in Romney's policy platform, Huckabee instead impugns his character merely by accusing him of believing Jesus and Satan are brothers, because everyone knows that's way wackier than believing that Jesus is God's son but Satan is just a fallen angel!
Are you fucking kidding me?
It's bad enough that presidential candidates are debating the finer points of theology in the first place, but that the debate is supposed to prove who would make a better President of the United States is manifestly preposterous. We have lost the plot, people.
Listen, I don't give a shit if a politician is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Pagan, a Zoroastrian, a Scientologist, a Pastafarian, or a worshipper of the Great Pumpernickel Loaf from the Eighth Dimension of the Planet Zorgon. All I ask from the people who want my vote is that they not attempt to legislate their personal spiritual beliefs or pen asinine resolutions proclaiming their belief system to be Teh Greatest in Teh Universe!!11!!!--or even "one of the great religions of the world," because you'll never convince me in a million years that a government overtly sanctioning such feelings of supremacy has nothing to do with despicable shit like "Happy Hanukkah" eliciting a beating.
I'm an atheist; I'm married to an atheist; I've got friends who are atheists; atheists contribute to this blog; I also have family members who are Christian; I've got friends who are Christian and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Pagan; religious people contribute to this blog--and the one thing on which all of us agree is that religion doesn't belong in politics, because all of us are smart enough to have long ago discerned the basic freakin' concept that religion, no less one very precise manifestation of one specific religion, is not the singular genesis of morality. No one's got the market cornered on morals.
What someone believes has only the capacity to convey about them that they believe that thing. Saying "I'm a Christian" or "I'm agnostic" or "I'm a Sikh" says nothing about a person's intrinsic character, despite what plenty of people who wear each of those labels (and others) would have us believe. Whether one believes that Jesus and Satan were respectively God's son and a fallen angel, brothers, gay lovers, or characters in a fairy tale shouldn't serve as a substitute for the collective quality of a person established by actions; what one believes does not equal who one is.
So it doesn't really matter a fig to me whether Romney believes Jesus and Satan are brothers; I still know he's a disingenuous, opportunistic, integrity-challenged dodo. That Huckabee is trying to make it an issue only confirms that he is a brainless, ethically-impaired gobshite, hiding behind his religion because he's got nothing else to offer.
Their respective religious beliefs didn't figure at all in those calculations.
“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And thats what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”
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