The Nightly Show's Larry Wilmore started things off this Tuesday evening by taking on right wing hero and huge flaming hypocrite, Kim Davis and her supporters who have been comparing her to Martin Luther King Jr., after she was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in Kentucky.
WILMORE: But she's got a lot of support, and people are calling her brave because she's “speaking her mind.” That's right, she's “speaking her mind.” But if “speaking her mind” hurts other people, that’s not brave, it’s bullshit. Here's what I want to know. Why is speaking your mind a quality rewarded above all others right now? Doesn’t it seem like that? I mean, it doesn’t matter that Donald Trump called Mexicans rapists. He was “speaking his mind.” I'm voting for him. He's “speaking his mind.”
“I can't let those gays get married because of my beliefs.” No one cares about your beliefs. The whole point of a government job is to not give a damn. That's the whole point. That’s why you work for the government.
After wishing that Davis had just gone away quietly and tried to remember what the Bible actually says, Wilmore reminded everyone that it is Kentucky and an election year, so instead we were treated to the debacle we discussed here yesterday, with Mike Huckabee playing “Eye of the Tiger” awaiting Kim Davis on stage outside of the jail. His response was pretty much the same as mine when I saw it.... “You've got to be fucking kidding me.”
WIMMORE: I don’t know about you guys, but when I see a group of people from the South with white crosses cheering to not allow people their constitutional rights, it kind of just gives me a tingly, lynch-y feeling.
And then of course, there's Fox “news” and wingnuts like regular Pastor Robert Jeffress comparing Davis to MLK:
WILMORE: Motherfucker, you know you've never quoted Dr. King in your life. Right? I know it's a generalization, but you know I'm right.
So let me see if I’ve got this right: A lady forcing her religious beliefs onto an entire community by refusing to do her job reminds you of King’s 7,000-word meditation on non-violence and racism in the church. Oh god, I haven’t seen someone miss the point so dramatically since they made Robert DeNiro the intern in ‘The Intern.’ It just doesn’t make sense.
And just to clarify for the Kim Davis supporters who think this lady is a Dr. King, in his letters from Birmingham Jail, King actually condemned contemporary church's weak and ineffectual voices, and said “Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent – and often even vocal – sanction of things as they are.”
Martin Luther King was actually in opposition to the church’s unwillingness to support the oppressed. Kim Davis, on the other hand, is using her church to oppress people even more.
Going to jail does not necessarily put you on par with Martin Luther King. Jeffrey Dahmer was in jail because he believed in eating people. That doesn't make him a freedom fighter.
And frankly, if you're going to compare Kim Davis to someone from the 1960's civil rights movement, it should be this guy. That's right. Alabama Governor and Dippity-Do poster boy, George Wallace, who famously stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama in defiance of the Supreme Court order to desegregate.
That’s what Kim Davis sounds like — less like ‘Letters from a Birmingham Jail’ and more like words from an Alabama bigot.
h/t Raw Story
