Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming [View all]

[kpete]

Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of:

“a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break”

Reagan would later equivocate on these views, allowing that the Fair Housing Act, for instance, had “hastened the solution of a lot of problems.” Yet he remained, at best, startlingly tone deaf on anything to do with race, and unwilling to say anything that might alienate his political constituency. On the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, for instance, Reagan called the assassination of America’s greatest civil rights leader, “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break”—an astonishing exercise in moral equivalizing, which seemed to associate King’s agitation for enforcement of the civil rights guarantees already embedded in the constitution, with the action of his own murderer.

http://www.kevinbaker.info/c_lnpfm.html

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....King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they'd break--in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963:

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong….

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/

another link:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/dr-king-and-conservatives.html