How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.
And here is King in his famous "I Have A Dream" speech:
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
For King, as it was for the Founders and Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence set the principle of equality as the cornerstone of our regime. King saw that the principles of the Declaration were in line with the natural law and that following those principles would lead to a just cause to a just conclusion. Because we as a nation at that time and even today, albeit in a more benign way, still have yet to live up to those principles in no way invalidates the justness of those natural law principles themselves. But to end here would not tell the full picture.
William F. Buckley on the Rev. King's adherence above all to following the precepts of Christianity and the teachings of the Bible:
We read the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., whose life we celebrate while tending to ignore the essence of his ideals, the ideals acclaimed by him, as by Abraham Lincoln, as the ground of his idealism. A bizarre paradox in the new secular order is the celebration of Dr. King’s birthday, a national holiday acclaimed as the heartbeat of articulated idealism in race relations, conscientiously observed in our schools, with, however, scant thought given to Dr. King’s own faith. What is largely overlooked, in the matter of Dr. King, is his Christian training and explicitly Christian commitment. Every student is familiar with the incantation, “I have a dream.” Not many are familiar with the peroration. The closing words were, “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” The sermon Martin Luther King preached at the Ebenezer Baptist Church three months before he was killed was selected by his votaries as the words to be replayed at his funeral. It closed, “If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, then my living will not be in vain.” George Washington would not have been surprised by Dr. King’s formulation. Washington admonished against any “supposition” that “morality can be maintained without religion.” “Reason and experience,’’ he commented, “both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Two centuries before the advent of Dr. King, George Washington wrote with poetic force a letter to the Hebrew congregation of Savannah on the divine auspices of intercreedal toleration. “May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors … continue to water them with the dews of heaven and make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.”
We should keep this in mind when we honor MLK's legacy.
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