Weigel

Jamie Stiehm's column about a "mistake" on the new Oval Office rug is getting a lot of attention on a sleepy holiday weekend. According to Stiehm, the rug falsely attributes this quote to Martin Luther King, Jr:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Stiehm points out that King, when he said this, "quoted" 19th century transcendentalist Theodore Parker. Her proof: This quote from Parker.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a longone... but from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.

You read this English-language blog, so you'll notice that Parker and King said different things . King cribbed the arc/universe/justice concept, and credited it, but he phrased it differently. And his phrasing is the one that appears on the rug : "The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice." Parker never used those exact words. King did. Look, here's a video of King using those exact words from 1965, which I found in six seconds of googling.

Stiehm's writing a book about abolition, so a well-placed op-ed pointing out an "error" like this is a smart thing for her to do, but her column doesn't even go as far as the headline it was given. She provides the evidence that King cooked up a new version of Parker's concept. So is the argument that the White House blundered by attributing a quote to the man who used those exact words instead of the man who used some of the same words in a different order 100 years earlier? Really? People, step away from the laptops and grill something.