On today’s episode of Liberty Counsel’s “Faith and Freedom” radio program, Mat Staver reacted to a recent Oklahoma Supreme Court decision striking down a proposed “personhood” amendment to the state constitution by comparing the effort to pass such laws to Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Liberty Counsel recently formed a partnership with Personhood USA to essentially serve as the legal arm of the effort to pass laws all over the nation that “declare that human life begins at conception.” The effort to pass such laws has caused rifts in the anti-abortion movement between those pushing the radical measures and other groups that prefer to take a more incremental approach to outlawing abortion, prompting Staver to directly compare the “personhood” movement to King’s crusade for civil rights:
But it goes back, somewhat, to Martin Luther King, Jr’s. “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” When he was there in the Birmingham Jail and he was protesting certain injustices there in Alabama, some of the ministers said “Dr. King, it’s too early to do this, why don’t you allow the newly elected mayor and some of those newly elected individuals to have a chance to do what you want them to do?” And he says “you know, that’s easy for you to say but we’ve lived under injustice for 400 years. The time has come to act now.”
We’ve lived under absolute killing of unborn children since 1973. The time to act, I think, as long passed. It’s now.
This is yet another example of the trend that Peter pointed out last month of Religious Right leaders “claiming Dr. King’s moral authority as their own, positioning themselves as inheritors of his righteous struggle, and claiming against all evidence and history that he would support their war on Planned Parenthood, their opposition to legal protections for LGBT Americans and their families, their crusades against separation of church and state, and their free market fundamentalism.”
