I had decided that it was pointless to respond any longer as, evidently, we simply will never agree. But you do raise one observation that is worthy of comment. You say that if I consider MLK morally authoritative, then i must be a raging liberal. In fact, liberalism of the early 60's is something to which I subscribe. It was classical liberalism. King, for example, demanded equality (of opportunity) for Blacks, but not so much as a people, but as individuals. JFK stood strong for the US role in both spreading and defending freedom by force of arms in a dangerous world where freedom has powerful enemies. Chances are bloody good that he would have supported GWB's plan to foment a democratic revolution in place of the threatening Islamic one - as seen in its support from several old time Democrats of the Kennedy era..
That Liberalism morphed into something altogether different. Liberalism today is about obsession with equality as determined by groups and statistics. It is no longer about equality of opportunity but, equality of results. Thus liberals today are obsessed with race, constantly measuring statistical outcomes for groups who, overall, do less well than others. When sub groups become more important than the individual, classical liberalism is no more. For rights and freedoms were centred on the individual. That was the essential building block of justice. No more.
That Liberalism has morphed into multicultural gobbledygook, such that the left can no longer understand that freedom has real enemies. Instead, it sees those who see those enemies as the enemy, much to the delight, explouited well, by those enemies. (You might want to read the tehari piece i posted, where he speaks of the Iranian Islamist plans to exploit exactly that in their plans to become an Islamist empire snuffing out freedom.) It has morphed into naive pacifism at any price.
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