On my long-neglected blog I recommended replacing Martin Luther King Day with Civil Rights Day. Here’s the case I made.
For years I’d heard news stories about debates over whether or not to establish an official Martin Luther King holiday, and never did anyone report the arguments against. I always suspected that one was that we had way too many day-off-of-work holidays as it was. Having one three weeks after Christmas does seem a bit superfluous. MLK Day would be only the third national holiday named after a person, the others being Christmas and Columbus Day, commemorating the chief catalyst for Western culture and the chief catalyst for extending Western culture to the Americas. (In the case of the latter, make that Western cultures; English and Iberian influences were vastly different.) Some, I imagine, feel that only those rare individuals who have had such a radical impact should have holidays named for them. Dr. King isn’t in that league; the only Americans who are are the Founders; their holiday is July 4.
Here’s my argument against making [the third Monday of January] an official holiday: it’s not fair to everyone else involved in the civil rights movement. Independence Day isn’t just about one guy. We have a holiday for all those who made the Declaration of Independence happen. We should have a federal holiday called Civil Rights Day. It would be like Memorial Day, honoring leaders of past civil rights struggles instead of soldiers of past wars.
I can understand this but I’m comfortable with calling it MLK Day. ‘Civil Rights’ is to me a rather fuzzy and even contentious topic. At the risk of being offensive, there’s a lot of attempts to expand the heroic efforts of many people to achieve recognition of the equal rights of black Americans to cover people who in no way endured as much as they did for nearly as long. Making the holiday about the specific black American who spoke probably most eloquently for the concept of an America where skin color is irrelevant is a good way to keep the day anchored in that remembrance, rather than it becoming something like “President’s Day”.
I would like to see the fake “BLM Independence Day” ejected from the Federal Holiday altogether, however.
February 17th is officially Washington’s Birthday per Federal law; it may be shown as “President’s Day” in some jurisdictions, but that doesn’t change what it is.
I’ll pitch in and give a big thumbs-up to Christopher’s comment.
I was a having a discussion the other day with a friend about strategies of the Left and one of the things we focused on was something few openly discuss. For the past 50+ years the Left has been using the Civil Rights movement from the 50s + 60s as the framework to push other causes – from Native America/Indian to gay rights to extensions of the LGB alphabet people.
In a sense they have conscripted MLK and others as well as our national history of slavery and Jim Crow to “next cause” and using the same playbook/ Oppressed minority looking to be free and their rightful place in society “We’re here, we’re clear…”
Well on one that’s smart politics and PR, it attaches your cause to that nearly everyone now supports. The fact that the front edge of today’s civil rights deals with 47+ genders and men playing women sports and my guess will be MAPS is besides the point.
The Left uses the civil rights movements of the past the same way the left guard in football uses a chop block, to open holes and allow their favorite cause to run through the opposition.
Much of what we grew up believing about the civil rights movement was, at base, a lie curated by the mostly left-wing media. The point of it was not so much to help black people as to harm working-class white people. And let’s admit that King was in reality a thoroughly rotten human being, not worthy of the honors that have been heaped on him by our corrupt progressivist ruling class. A dose of honesty about this dubious movement is long overdue.