Please, Politicize My Funeral

Susan G at Daily Kos smacks the tight-assed lily-white pundit class for their completely politically based “outrage” over the tenor at Coretta Scott King’s funeral service.

I have two words for these whiny-babies with seriously clinical martyr complexes: Ronald Reagan. Is that funeral even over yet on Fox?

Not only do these hypocritical conservatives want to step in and tell me and my family that I can be kept alive for years against my wishes, a petri dish harboring their precious “culture of life,” now they want to control the “message” at my funeral. Well … I’ve got news for them. It’s time they shut their yaps, this GOP party of control freaks extraordinaire.

I think progressives, especially those with high profiles or fame, should just add a clause to their wills, making it bloody clear that they want their funerals to reflect their lives, and that their love for peace and justice, for equality and fairness, for tolerance and compassion, should be front and center. Then post the damm thing on the front door of the proceedings, so that Kate O’Beirne and Matt Drudge can rest assured that the deceased is resting easy with the event.

Jeez.

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About civil rites:

First, let’s keep in mind that King did not start out as a sweet, photogenic old lady with bipartisan appeal. She may have been committed to nonviolent methods, but she was a fighter nonetheless, a woman who, like my namesake Rosa Parks, never shrank from speaking truth to power.

When she marched beside her husband through the streets of Montgomery, Ala., King didn’t worry about being “appropriate.” Had she been a little more “appropriate,” she would have stayed “in her place,” content with the back of the bus and the inferior facilities reserved for “colored” people.

When her husband was assassinated in 1968, King kept right on being inappropriate. A day before his funeral, at a time when many conventionally “decent” women might have stayed home weeping, she took his place marching with striking Memphis sanitation workers and, soon after, spoke at an anti-Vietnam War rally.

King never did stop being “inappropriate” and “tactless.” She spoke out against homophobia, even when some of her own friends wanted to look the other way. “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice,” she said in 1998. “But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ “

2 thoughts on “Please, Politicize My Funeral”

re February 10, 2006

About civil rites:

First, let’s keep in mind that King did not start out as a sweet, photogenic old lady with bipartisan appeal. She may have been committed to nonviolent methods, but she was a fighter nonetheless, a woman who, like my namesake Rosa Parks, never shrank from speaking truth to power.

When she marched beside her husband through the streets of Montgomery, Ala., King didn’t worry about being “appropriate.” Had she been a little more “appropriate,” she would have stayed “in her place,” content with the back of the bus and the inferior facilities reserved for “colored” people.

When her husband was assassinated in 1968, King kept right on being inappropriate. A day before his funeral, at a time when many conventionally “decent” women might have stayed home weeping, she took his place marching with striking Memphis sanitation workers and, soon after, spoke at an anti-Vietnam War rally.

King never did stop being “inappropriate” and “tactless.” She spoke out against homophobia, even when some of her own friends wanted to look the other way. “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice,” she said in 1998. “But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ “

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