WASHINGTON, D.C. - This Saturday, Glenn Beck will host a political rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. After initially claiming that the location and date of his DC rally was purely coincidental, Beck finally admitted he was trying to "reclaim" the Civil Rights Movement that Dr. King once led:
We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.
Beck later added that Dr. King's dream "is being massively perverted," and that the real Civil Rights movement wasn't about "social justice, but equal justice."
Reached for comment up in Heaven, Dr. King declined to answer questions about Beck's rally. Instead, Dr. King issued a brief press release referencing speeches he had given in the past, and told this novice reporter "not to bother me again unless its important." The text of Dr. King's press release follows below:
"To clear up any confusion, here are some of my views on a few subjects of importance.
On property rights
I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons - who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man.
- The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
- Beyond Vietnam, 1967
On poverty
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
- Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a "divine dissatisfaction." Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home.
- Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just."
- Beyond Vietnam, 1967
On Socialism
Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
- Beyond Vietnam, 1967
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
- Beyond Vietnam
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
- Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised.
- Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
On war
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
- Beyond Vietnam, 1967
Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It appropriates poverty funds with miserliness and grudging reluctance. The government is emotionally committed to the war. It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.
- The Domestic Impact of the War, 1967
Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.
- "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, 1968
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
- speech in St. Louis, Missouri, March 22, 1964
On patriotism
The war has strengthened domestic reaction. It has given the extreme right, the anti-labor, anti-Negro, and anti-humanistic forces a weapon of spurious patriotism to galvanize its supporters into reaching for power, right up to the White House. It hopes to use national frustration to take control and restore the America of social insecurity and power for the privileged.
- The Domestic Impact of the War, 1967
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government.
- Beyond Vietnam, 1967
Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America "you are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power ..."
- Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.
- Beyond Vietnam, 1967
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
- Beyond Vietnam, 1967
On Glenn Beck
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Strength to Love, 1963