Black Lives Matter comes to Rochester?

Sort of.  There was a march--I was on the parade route at Dunkin' Donuts while it went by--and the first really interesting thing was that when I looked for a guy I'd met--about 6'4" and of robust girth, easy to spot--he wasn't there, but a young lady from my church was.  Sure enough, when I looked up the Facebook page of the local black Baptist church, they were telling members and attendees not to go.  So apparently there are at least two BLM movements in our city.  What the differences are, I'm not sure, but there is a rivalry.

What were they saying?  Well, about the worst it got was "no more racist cops", a sentiment with which I agree, but it's unclear to me how much racism goes on here--let's just say that some of the best patients at Mayo are non-whites who fly halfway around the world to get here.  If there were a large number of DWB citations or worse, City Hall would be hearing about it.

So what does BLM believe?  Well, with the obvious caveats that there about there being two such movements (just as Dr. King headed one, and Malcolm X headed another back in the 1960s) at least, and not every adherent believes everything, a few things of note are that the rights of LGTB.... seem to be about as important to them as the rights of blacks, that they're trying to end mass incarceration of blacks (really everyone), and they specifically note that they're committed to disrupting the "western prescribed nuclear family." 

In other words, it's exactly what one would predict if we assumed that the center of the black civil rights movement had migrated away from the church (at least the orthodox churches) and found itself in a secular, or at least UCC, position, which anyone watching Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton over the past 35 years (e.g. myself) would have guessed.  

The biggest problem here is not that some marches talk about "dead pigs", though that is a nasty reality in places.  The far bigger deal is the question of their agenda, in particular by weakening nuclear families and getting criminals out of jail.   

Now don't get me wrong; I love my extended family and community, and benefit greatly from them.  But that said, extended family and community builds on the nuclear family and its economic and other provisions--so really, you cannot move to a "community" model a la Hilliary Clinton's It takes a Village if the nuclear family is broken, and quite frankly, the inner city demonstrates this in a horrific way, as Sen. Moynihan noted in 1965.

In the same way, extended family and community, not to mention protection of LGBTQ.... rights, depends greatly on whether anti-social and criminal elements can be rehabilitated or removed--and for the most part, that means churches rehabilitate and the state jails criminals. 

Which is to say that the "end point" for this branch of BLM is more or less the same liberal utopianism that has been tried, and has failed, since the mid 1800s, and really at the cost of tens of thousands of lives (among those born) and millions of lives among the pre-born.  And so the question for the BLM activist who believes this is simple:

How's it working out for you?  It's been tried in your community for over half a century.