The past two weeks saw a convergence of observances and news stories that, for me, encapsulates the horrific toll of two fundamental policies of modern liberalism on the black community.

National School Choice Week provided an ironic backdrop for a news story out of Akron, Ohio, where Kelley Williams-Bolar, a mother of two girls, was convicted of a felony for falsifying her residence of record so her girls could attend a better and safer public school than the one in their poor, crime-ridden neighborhood.

Similarly, pro-life advocates gathered to commemorate the legally and morally misguided U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade to legalize the infanticide of abortion, while authorities in Philadelphia were coming to grips with the butchery of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Dr. Gosnell stands accused of conducting illegal late-term abortions, murdering babies aborted alive by severing their spinal cords with scissors, and leaving “a trail of injured and dead female patients in his wake over several decades”, according to the grand jury report.

In each of these cases, black women were among the victims, and their plights highlight two of the most significant problems facing the black community in America today – the lack of quality education for all our children, and the disproportionate number of black babies murdered in abortuaries across the nation.

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I must confess that I’m always a little squeamish when it comes to writing about the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I read all the tributes and the calls to honor the work of this great man this week, and some of them, regardless of how sincere they may be, make me squirm.

Political partisans on both sides are trying to claim Dr. King as their own, and this tug of war over a dead man’s life feels out of place when he’s not here to speak for himself. Even members of his own family are at odds over how his legacy translates into today’s policy debates.

I suppose that’s a good thing in at least one respect; if both sides are trying to lay claim to Dr. King’s legacy, they are both in their own way acknowledging him as a great man. I just feel that, like any man, Dr. King can’t be reduced to a political talking point because he was much more complex than that.

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One of the valuable lessons I’ve learned in my 50-plus years of living is not to respond to an emotional event on the spur of the moment, but to give reason and thought the opportunity to take hold and better inform one’s actions.

Regrettably, that lesson was ignored by far too many people this weekend.

I was somewhat isolated from the news for a good part of Saturday morning and afternoon, so when I returned home, prepared for an afternoon of playoff football, I didn’t know about the massacre in Tucson, Arizona that gravely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), killed six, including a 9-year old girl and a federal judge, and injured 14 others.

As stunned as I was by this senseless act of violence, I was equally sickened by the shameless exploitation of this tragedy by the liberal elite and the sycophants who parrot them, for the purposes of smearing their political opponents.

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