I am very happy for the people of Alabama that they have at least one public official who understands history and the importance of acknowledging it, and I am thrilled that Rep. John Lewis lived to see it:

An Alabama police chief brought Rep. John Lewis to tears Saturday, apologizing to the noted civil rights leader for failing to protect the Freedom Riders during a trip to Montgomery in 1961.

Lewis and fellow civil rights activists were beaten by a mob after arriving at Montgomery's Greyhound station in May, 1961.

On Saturday at ceremony at First Baptist Church, the city's current police chief, Kevin Murphy, apologized to Lewis and offered him his badge in a gesture of reconciliation, telling the longtime Georgia congressman that Montgomery police had "enforced unjust laws" in failing to protect the Freedom Riders more than five decades ago.

Lewis, who was arrested during civil rights protests in cities across the south, said it was the first time a police chief had apologized to him.

"It means a great deal," Lewis said. "I teared up. I tried to keep from crying."

Lewis and other members of Congress were taking part in the 13th Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage to Alabama, a three-day event that also included trips to Selma, Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.

Murphy said the decision to apologize was easy.

"For me, freedom and the right to live in peace is a cornerstone of our society and that was something that Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Congressman Lewis were trying to achieve," Murphy said. "I think what I did today should have been done a long time ago. It needed to be done. It needed to be spoken because we have to live with the truth and it is the truth."

Minorities and women have gained broader rights and acceptance through military service. Service in the open would result in broader acceptance and understanding for LGBTs. And we can't have that, can we?

Both courts and Congress are still discussing how DADT may or may not shake out in the next 100 days, but everyone is agreeing that some nebulous consensus of opinion should form among DoD branches. The Air Force seems ready to adapt to social change, the Navy and Army have not spoken. Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Amos has been the first to weigh in with a contrary opinion, but no one should be surprised because the Corps is always last to integrate. As the US Army's history on service integration of minorities puts it:

The Truman order, the Fahy Committee, even the demands of civil rights leaders and the mandates of the draft law, all exerted pressure for reform and assured the presence of some black marines. But the Marine Corps was for years able to stave off the logical outcome of such pressures, and in the end it was the manpower demands of the Korean War that finally brought integration. (Emphasis mine)

Much more after the jump and a video:

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What no one has really pointed out about Glenn Beck's upcoming pep rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is that, in claiming he's following the example of Martin Luther King, he's actually positioning this gig as a civil-rights event. But whose civil rights? Well, judging by what we've seen at the Tea Parties inspired by Beck, it's gonna be pretty damned white.

It is thus, in essence, a civil-rights march for white people. Or more particularly, for right-wing white people who feel threatened by the growing presence and power of the nonwhite population.

Of course, they don't put it that way. They know that race talk will just get them called out for what this is all really about. So they talk about "government oppression" and "taking away our freedoms" and "preserving the Constitution" and "what it means to be American". Strip these down to the bare bones -- especially when you peel away the layers of illogic required to support these claims -- and what's really at issue here is a black man leading nonwhite minorities to power, which is always perceived by authoritarians as a sign of their loss of power.

So that's what it's really about. If the rhetoric all seems terribly vague to you, that's why.

And what's really bizarre and Orwellian about this whole spectacle is that it's part of Beck's larger campaign to demonize progressives -- even though the civil-rights movement was always a progressive phenomenon, and indeed Martin Luther King Jr. often proclaimed some of the very themes, such as "social justice," that Beck loves to demonize as part of progressives' eeeeeevil plot to destroy America.

Moreover, as we've said previously and often, there's a reason conservatives like Beck should never, ever try to claim his mantle or his legacy: Because it was conservatives who attacked and demonized and opposed King at every turn in his career.

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We've been saying for awhile that for a guy like Glenn Beck to try to claim the mantle of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement for conservatives -- as he is clearly attempting to do with his August "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial -- is nothing short of a travesty -- especially when you consider that he otherwise spends his time promoting the work of a Bircherite Mormon who was otherwise well known for smearing King as a Communist (a practice Beck himself is notably fond of applying to other black liberals like Van Jones) and attacking "progressives" as a "cancer", even though King himself not only was a self-described progressive, but even made speeches proclaiming Beck's great shibboleth, "Social Justice."

Last night, Al Sharpton went on the air with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown and made clear that Civil Rights leaders are indeed deeply offended by Beck's desecration:

OLBERMANN: Read that phrase again: “we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place.” To your knowledge, who‘s this we he‘s talking about?

SHARPTON: I have no idea. From my study of history, those that claim to be the Tea Partiers and the followers and supporters of Mr. Beck and Mrs. Palin were the ones that today advocate the things that that march was against.

First of all, that march was to appeal to government to intervene and protect the rights of people. They are against big government. I mean, you don't have to get to race. Their idea of government and the idea that Dr. King and Roy Wilkins of—and others espoused is the exact opposite of what they're calling for. Dr. King met with Caesar Chavez and talked about how we protect people, no matter who they are, that come into the borders, and have a sound policy. They're the ones that are rallying against that. So I think that they are absolutely, unequivocally—I don't even have to get to the race side of this. They are against the concept of what the march was about in '63. And for them to now talk about we're going to reclaim or we're going to take back a movement, that they are the philosophical children of the Barry Goldwaters, who opposed it—I think it would be laughable if it wasn't so arrogant.

OLBERMANN: Yeah. What do you think—is there an attempt in here to desecrate Dr. King's memory and what everybody stood for then? Or is this just a publicity stunt by some sort of a megalomaniac?

SHARPTON: Well, whether it's an attempt to do the desecration or whether it's a publicity stunt, it can desecrate. The fact of the matter is the march was 47 years ago. So people that are middle-aged and younger would not understand what it was about if we did not do our rally that we do every year. And Urban League, Marc Morial and others that have inherited those organizations, as I came out as a kid in the aftermath of Dr. King's death from his movement—that's not what the movement is about.

The movement is about what they talked about them. Martin Luther King talked about America giving blacks and poor people a bad check. These people are the ones that don‘t want to even give you an unemployment check today. He talked about us having a judicial system that was fair. These are the people that defend brutality.

So I think that it will be a classic case of they're trying to hijack something. But there will be some of us in Washington, at another location. We're not going to confront them. We're going to do what we always do, affirm the dream to try to complete it, because we're not there yet.

Sharpton says the way to counter Beck's rally is for thousands to turn out for his "Reclaiming Rally" in New York the same weekend. And he said he's not alone in being offended:

SHARPTON: It's going—certainly it's energized by this distortion. I've talked to Martin Luther King III. He's coming and others. A lot of us are offended by it. But we're not going to play into that. We're going to put a clean glass next to whatever they do, wherever they do it.

OLBERMANN: It's a fascinating point that you can subtract the entire element of race out of this, and they've still gotten it wrong, from what Martin Luther King said in 1963.

SHARPTON: And if we had another hour, I could bring the race part up. If you just use government and what Martin Luther King said—read the whole speech. It is the exact antithesis of what they represent and what they‘re saying in the Tea Party.

Glenn Beck, of course, has no shame. It's about time someone called him out for his bizarre and hypocritical hijacking of Martin Luther King's legacy.

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Glenn Beck seems to be on a crusade of sorts to try to claim the Civil Rights Movement for conservatives. Lotsa luck with that, big guy.

Yesterday on his Fox News show he opened a segment with this:

Beck: I told you this summer that we are going to concentrate on restoring history. The history of our nation, the founding, the 20th century, the Depression era, um, and the Civil Rights Movement, which has been co-opted by progressives.

Of course, if Beck wants to make this claim, he won't be "restoring" history, unless by "restoring" you mean "utterly falsifying and inverting on its head".

Because, of course, as we've explained several times, the Civil Rights Movement from its very inception was a progressive cause. Beck's favorite Civil Rights icon, Martin Luther King, was a leading advocate of the same "social justice" that Beck now openly despises.

This whole project of Beck's -- built around his August 28 "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial -- is more than a little peculiar. It's become evident he wants to claim the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement for he and his fellows on the American Right.

There's only one little problem with all of that: Not only was the Civil Rights Movement a progressive cause from the start, it was the American Right that opposed, attacked, condemned, and undermined the Civil Rights marchers at every turn. It was conservatives, the Glenn Becks of their day, who publicly reviled them and inspired the deadly lynch mobs and Klansmen who committed acts of violence against them.

Indeed, some of their propaganda looks more than a little familiar, don't you think?

This, you see, was a flier that was distributed widely as part of a campaign to discredit King as a Communist. Among the formost leaders in that campaign, especially among Mormons, was none other than the Church's future president, Ezra Taft Benson.

Here are some prime quotes from Benson:

“LOGAN, UTAH-Former Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson charged Friday night that the civil-rights movement in the South had been ‘formatted almost entirely by the Communists.’ Elder Benson, a member of the Council of the Twelve of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in a public meeting here that the whole civil-rights movement was ‘phony.’” (Deseret News, Dec. 14, 1963)

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