Shaming Coretta

The funeral for Coretta Scott King yesterday was in many ways dignified and worthy of the woman whose life it celebrated. But some of the speakers and the guests -- at certain points -- shamed themselves and soiled the occasion they came to celebrate.

The worst was Rev. Joseph Lowery, who tried to embarrass President Bush by claiming, "We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there." We know no such thing. All anyone can claim is that we haven't found any. In fact, all who actually know anything about it agree that there were indeed WMDs "over there" at one point. The question is, where are they now?

And even if he was right, how about exhibiting a little of Mrs. King's famous class instead of using the woman's own funeral to make such a cheap, cliched point?

And then there was former President and current Panderer-in-Chief James Earl Carter, whose knack for embarrassing himself without apparently realizing it is getting hard to watch. He said that the ceremony was not only to commemorate Coretta and Martin's lives, but to "remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over." For proof, says he, "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi... Those who were most devastated by Katrina know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Does he mean that if only these people would have been white, Mayor Naggin would have fired up the idle school buses and evacuated them? Although it was indeed heart-breaking to see such suffering, must Carter and Company continue to humiliate the poor by suggesting that they are too inept--or too black--to work their way out of poverty, despite plenty of evidence (e.g., the city's own mayor) to the contrary?

Besides, their poverty doesn't prove anything about the state of equal opportunity in the U.S. -- but it does testify to the lack of guaranteed equal outcomes, a state of affairs that apparently annoys Carter to no end.

Equally disgraceful was the crowd's reaction -- sustained applause -- to both of these stunts. It made them look rude and misinformed, if not brainwashed.

Pettiest yet saddest of all, and I hate to say this, was the Reverend Bernice King's claim that sexism is still a problem because the audience didn't sufficiently cheer her comparison of her mother to the biblical Joshua. Maybe they were too dazed by Bernice's barely concealed grab for her parents' legacy to respond.