Martin Luther King Jr.’s son on Tuesday condemned Kenneth Starr, a member of President Trump’s defense team in his Senate impeachment trial, for invoking his father while defending the president.
“Context and content always matters. When my father spoke about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, he had just finished marching fifty miles from Selma to Montgomery. My father used his words and actions to provide leadership to the most successful pro-democracy movement in this country’s history,” Martin Luther King III said in a statement.
“Martin Luther King Jr.’s name is synonymous with justice and fairness. He certainly believed that justice and fairness should be available to everyone. But what mockery, what hypocrisy, and rank opportunism to equate my father’s views about 246 years of enslavement and almost 100 year of segregation and their client’s intent to undermine constitutional governance,” he added.
King accused the Trump administration of invoking his father while failing to address the political issues most important to him and his civil rights advocacy.
“By the way, where is their client’s voting rights bill to eliminate voter suppression tactics? Where is his Attorney General who is supposed to defend the rule of law and protect the rights of all Americans? Where are the judges that would rule with King’s word in mind? They’re all missing,” King said.
Starr quoted King on the Senate floor Tuesday in his defense of the president, saying, “During his magnificent life, Dr. King spoke not only about freedom, freedom standing alone, he spoke frequently about freedom and justice. And in his speeches, he summed it up regularly the words of a Unitarian abolitionist from the prior century, Theodore Parker, who referred to the moral arc of the universe, the long moral arc of the universe points toward justice. Freedom and justice.”