MLK was NOT God!

There was a letter to the editor in The Dallas Morning News yesterday about James Fantroy (see previous post "Why would you give a thief a pat on the back?"). In this letter, Kay Brooks of Irving talks about Mr. Fantroy's "worst" sin. In her opinion, it wasn't that he stole $20,000. It wasn't that he adamantly refused to admit his guilt. It wasn't that he lied when he said he was going to pay the money back. No, according to Ms. Brooks, "the really horrid thing Mr. Fantroy did was to compare himself to the Rev. Martin Luther King. This was a colossal insult to a great man."

I can agree with Ms. Brooks that Fantroy is no Martin Luther King. He does not come anywhere close to having King's charisma or oratory skills. However, Martin Luther King was also a thief. It is well-known and documented that he plagiarized. Starting in 1986, Ralph E. Luker and Clayborn Carson worked on researching King's early life for the Martin Luther King Papers Project. Luker said, "What became increasingly clear as we worked through the papers from King's early career is that there were serious problems of plagiarism in his academic work." Boston College convened a panel and concluded that there was certainly plagiarism, but they declined to revoke his degree. There were, however, dissenters to the decision. According to Luker, Garry Wills argued "that there was no statute of limitations on plagiarism. Neither death, nor Nobelity, nor immortality conferred immunity from the consequences of academic theft, he said. Boston should have revoked the doctorate."

I don't see what's so "horrid" about one thief comparing himself to another thief. MLK was a thief (not to mention also an alleged adulterer) -- he was not God!