Black Christian leaders not accepting the equivalence of discrimination against blackness with discrimination against homosexual acts

Kathlene M. writes:

Here’s another example of how liberalism distorts even the words of one of its own, Martin Luther King Jr., for its own ends, with one end being the elimination of dissent. Today on Martin Luther King Day, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s executive director Rea Carey stated that, “We believe that were he alive today, Dr. King would be standing with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community as we too reach for equality.”

A press conference of more than 40 African-American religious and political leaders gathered today at Freedom Baptist Church in Hillside, Illinois to challenge this “misrepresentation of King’s legacy.” Its announcement denied that opposition to discrimination based on “immutable, non-behavioral, morally neutral condition like race” was equivalent to an effort to “normalize and institutionalize deviant sexual relations.” [LA replies: I can’t believe that anyone today would use such old-fashioned terms as “deviant sexual relations.” Certainly an awful lot of “conservatives” wouldn’t speak that way. As we have seen in the disastrous aftermath of the repeal of the prohibition of homosexuality in the armed services, a very large part of the conservative movement now believes that there is nothing wrong with homosexual conduct, and that all negative judgments of and exclusions of homosexuality should be eliminated.]

The Illinois Family Institute issued their own press release that gets to the very heart of the matter. (Bolded emphasis is mine.) It stated that “homosexual activists and their allies … seek to intimidate philosophical conservatives into silence by associating them with racism and bigotry. Volitional homosexual acts are not equivalent to race. And morals beliefs regarding volitional homosexual conduct are not equivalent to racism … We should not allow the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be exploited for the destructive purposes of the movement to normalize homosexuality and demonize traditional moral beliefs.”

Does this all sound familiar? Liberals seek to silence conservatives, using the Tucson Massacre as the basis for free speech restrictions on conservatives. And homosexual activists seek to silence religious conservatives, using Martin Luther King’s call for African-American civil rights as the basis for broad freedom of religion and free speech restrictions. Any and all reasonable or moral conservative opposition to liberals will be eliminated under the guise of “hate speech.” The liberal Brotherhood of Man isn’t looking so brotherly in the future.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

I notice that many conservatives have expressed some measure of outrage, or disbelief, at the statement, “We believe that were he alive today, Dr. King would be standing with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community as we too reach for equality.” The idea seems to be that King (peace be upon him) was simply too good and too principled ever to have knuckled under to the left on the homosexual agenda. I mean after all—he was a preacher!

Let’s be serious. I happen to think that King would almost certainly be a signatory to the entire leftist agenda if he were alive today. I’ve never heard a single convincing reason why he would be the lone civil rights era holdout bravely holding the line on abortion, homosexuality, and the entire liberal buffet of radical social change. People forget that there was no shortage of black leaders who used the language of racial harmony and color blindness, who have since become rabid advocates of a racial spoils system that was instituted literally within a few years of King’s death.

The Democratic Party has made it an absolute prerequisite of citizenship on the liberal plantation that black leaders must acquiesce to the left’s entire social agenda. If anybody thinks he’d be in the trenches with Ward Connerly, waging war on affirmative action because his race-blind principles were so unshakable, then he’s a fool, besmitten of the one-dimensional portrayal of King as the patron saint of racial harmony. Perhaps they imagine he would be a contributor to FrontPage Magazine, in appreciation of Horowitz’s (tediously rehearsed) time as a foot soldier for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

LA replies:

I agree.

Also, King’s white conservative hagiographers are deeply dishonest. In the last two or three years of his life, he embraced the radical left including the leftist demand for group equality of outcome, including anti-Americanism. (I wrote an entry about King’s disgraceful 1967 speech in which in typical leftist fashion he blamed America for all the ills of the world, but I can’t find it at the moment.) For conservatives to uphold him as an exponent of the neocon, individualist, colorblind, patriotic ideology, when he had clearly given up that ideology, is a lie.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 18, 2011 10:40 AM | Send