Pirate's Cove

In case you were unaware, today is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. As such, it behooves the Washington Post Editorial Board to publish an editorial which proclaims that he would support all the “Syrian” refugees and other Muslims that Mr. Obama wants to import to the United States, an editorial that starts out, unshockingly, with bashing a few Republicans who have called for a temporary hold on bringing in more of these Muslim refugees until we can truly verify who they are.

But on the holiday set aside to honor Martin Luther King Jr., it is worth recalling that tactical consequences are not the principal reason Americans should find the Trump proposal repellent. We are a nation founded on the ideal that every individual has value and deserves to be judged on his or her own merit. Each of us can make choices about the importance, to ourselves, of our racial or national heritage, our religion or lack thereof, our sexual identity. No one else has the right to make those choices for us. Being Muslim, or black, or Irish American doesn’t tell anyone else who you are, much less what you are worth. When we start judging people based on the categories they belong to, we diminish ourselves.

Interesting. If we’re supposed to be judged on our own merit, then, according to the members of the WPEB, we should do away with all quotas, whether they be for school, work, sports, movies, awards, etc. According to the WPEB, groups like the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, and the Congressional Black Caucus should be abolished.

Double interesting, if no one else has the right to make choices for you, per the WPEB, then the WPEB should be against the way women and gays are treated within Islam.

Oh, and as far as judging people based on the categories they belong too? Perhaps the Editorial Board should look at how their paper continually judges negatively all those who fail to follow their WP’s liberal beliefs.

In April 1963, while he was in jail for leading nonviolent demonstrations against segregation in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. King, an Atlanta minister, faced criticism for having come from outside the state to stir up trouble. He rejected the “outside agitator” label. “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider,” he wrote.

That might leave room to think of foreigners differently; nations have a right to decide who may enter. But Dr. King would have been the first to say that recognizing the humanity of every person is essential in those decisions as in domestic affairs. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” Dr. King wrote in the same letter. “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Don’t you find it interesting that the WPEB, comprised mostly of White Liberal Men, just happens to know exactly what Dr. King would think on this issue?

Perhaps Dr. King might think differently. If we’re using the quote, perhaps he might think that all these refugees directly raping and sexually assaulting women and girls might indirectly affect all of us. Perhaps he might be a bit concerned over the need to provide class on “how not to rape”. Perhaps he might be a bit concerned about the violence and criminality that so many of the refugees bring. Perhaps he might be a bit concerned about how women are treated liked 2nd class citizens within Islam. I dare say Dr. King might know a bit about discrimination, and wouldn’t be too pleased at the way women and gays are treated within Islam.

That’s a precept that can be found in some variation in most of the world’s religions. It’s easy to preach, harder to practice. Our difficulty in sensing our place in that “inescapable network of mutuality” helps explain why a police officer may be more likely to shoot a fleeing suspect who doesn’t look like him, why we may be more forgiving of drug addiction when it afflicts people who do look like us — and why we can harden our hearts to desperate refu­gee children whose families worship an unfamiliar God.

Except, the majority of these “refugees” arriving in Europe so far tend to be young, fighting age males. One town had to take the extreme step of banning “Syrian” refugees from the public swimming pools because of all the sexual harassment originating from the refugees.

Crossed at Right Wing News.