THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: Bernice King Should Publicly Renounce Her Anti-Gay Bigotry

     *Bernice King can make history in two ways. She made it first by becoming the first woman in the fifty two year history of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to take the organization's reins.

     Now she can make history in another way. She should renounce the anti-gay bigotry of her recent past. That bigotry was on shameful and insulting display in December 2004 when she and thousands of marchers stood at the gravesite of her father, Martin Luther King, Jr., and denounced gay marriage.

     The implication was that King might well have stood with her and them in their protest against gay rights.

     Nothing could be further from the truth. King's fight against bigotry and discrimination, all bigotry and discrimination, was relentless and uncompromising.

     If anything that day, King would have been across the street from his gravesite with the hundred or so other counter-demonstrators. They loudly shouted that what Bernice and the marchers were doing at her father's gravesite and in his name, was a travesty and a disgrace. King sullied her father's name to show her enmity to gay marriage.

     She also sullied her mother's too. A few years before Bernice's gravesite antic, Coretta Scott King issued a public statement forcefully denouncing anti-gay bigotry and made it perfectly clear that her husband would be a champion of gay rights if he were alive.

     Bernice King is an outspoken evangelical, and she and other black evangelicals have marched, protested, wrote letters and circulated petitions denouncing gay marriage. This is (?) her belief and she certainly has the right to express it.

     That is she has the right as a minister, evangelical, religious fundamentalist, and private citizen. Her anti-gay bias swims forcefully in the main current of conservative evangelical belief, thought, and ... (READ MORE)