John McCain is today claiming that though Martin Luther King was killed when McCain was 32 he didn’t understand the “issue” when he was 47, 15 years later. He goes on to treat a commemoration of the leading civil rights figure in U.S. history as if he was just one of the lobbyists he employs on his campaign:
I had come from being in the military to running for Congress in a state that did not have a large African American population.
So is McCain saying that only states with large black populations should or did care enough to vote for Dr. King’s hollday? Or is McCain saying that King and the Civil Rights movement is just something like your local Mason’s lodge?
Or maybe he’s saying there weren’t any blacks in the military?
It’s hard to make straight talk out of anything that man says.
I don’t favor instituting a Federal holiday honoring a single person, unless that person is the founder of Western civilization (Jesus) or that accidental harbinger that brought Western Europe’s best political system to North America and its worst to Central and South America (Columbus).
I do favor a Civil Rights Day that would honor all civil rights leaders and not just one guy - the way we grouped all presidents into one holiday. Scheduling it in mid-January gives Dr. King a little extra prominence, reminding people who it was that inspired this holiday.