BlackCommentator.com January 14, 2016 - Issue 636: Where Would MLK Have Stood on Marriage Equality? - Inclusion By The Reverend Irene Monroe, BC Editorial Board

January 14, 2016 - Issue 636

Where Would MLK
Have Stood
on
Marriage Equality?

"As I comb through numerous books
and essays learning more about King’s
philandering, sexist attitude about women
at home and in the movement, and his
relationship with Bayard Rustin, I, too,
wonder would King today be a public
advocate for LGBTQ rights?"

This MLK holiday reminds me how Alabama has always been a troubling state when it comes to upholding the civil rights of its denizens.

Martin Luther King’s civil rights activism began in the unwelcoming “Heart of Dixie” in 1955 when on a cold December evening Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white passenger, birthing the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott was the first of what would be many historic marches and protests that would catapult King onto a national stage. His acts of civil disobedience in the 1950’s and 1960’s help elevate the country’s moral consciousness as Alabama struggled with hers. Sadly, in 2016 Alabama is still struggling.

So, when on January 6th the state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore ordered all probate judges to cease issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in spite of last June’s historic Supreme Court ruling — Obergefell v. Hodge — that legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states I wasn’t surprise. Rather, I was immediately reminded of Governor George Wallace’s 1963 famous inaugural speech when he unabashedly uttered “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” in defiance of SCOTUS’s historic “Brown vs. Board of Education” ruling upending this country’s “separate but equal” doctrine adopted in “Plessy vs. Ferguson”

When on January 8th the Mobile County Probate Office reopened its marriage window and resume issuance of marriage licenses I remembered I was asked by an editor from the UK “what would be MLK’s thoughts about the modern LGBTQ movement and the place of people of color in it?”

As I comb through numerous books and essays learning more about King’s philandering, sexist attitude about women at home and in the movement, and his relationship with Bayard Rustin, I, too, wonder would King today be a public advocate for LGBTQ rights?

King’s now deceased wife would say yes.

In 1998, Coretta Scott King addressed the LGBT group Lambda Legal in Chicago. In her speech, she said LGBTQ rights and civil rights were the same. “ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King’s dream to make room at the table of brother and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people,” she said.

Speculations on what King views would be vary within African American LGBTQ communities. But an overwhelming number in these communities look more to Bayard Rustin-then and now-than to King as a spokesperson for supporting our civil rights.

“I tend not to worry much about what MLK would do. I tend to look at someone such as Bayard Rustin as one prime driving force in civil rights and other activism. Rustin was there before WWII. And he never wavered, always looking for something new. It was Rustin who schooled King in Gandhi’s ideas. Rustin has simply said that the GLBT movement is the inheritor of civil rights activism in the US.....I’ll stick with Bayard,” a blogger wrote me.

Sadly, Bayard Rustin, the gay man who was chief organizer and strategist for the 1963 March on Washington that further catapulted Martin Luther King onto the world stage, was not the beneficiary of King’s dream.

In the Civil Rights movement Bayard Rustin was always the man behind the scene and a large part of that had to due with the fact that he was gay. Because of their own homophobia, many African American ministers involved in the Civil Right movement would have nothing to do with Rustin, and they intentionally rumored throughout the movement that King was gay because of his close friendship with Rustin.

I contend that we must understand King within the historical context of the homophobic Black Church, his waning popularity with the African American community and President L.B. Johnson, and his actions toward Bayard are enough to convince me King would not have spoken up on our behalf.

However I, like so many within the African American community-straight or gay, cannot fathom King marching against same-sex marriage as his youngest daughter, Rev. Bernice King, did.

On speculating about her father’s viewpoint on marriage equality, Bernice said,“I know in my sanctified soul that he did not take a bullet for same-sex marriage” while standing at her father’s gravesite in 2004 with thousands of protesters.

But is it fair to query whether King would have spoken out on LGBTQ justice when our civil rights movement had not begun?

"King was assassinated over a year before the NYC Stonewall Riots. Gay issues had not reached the level of being a “bona fide” national issue yet, and for King to have made a major public pronouncement regarding GLBT rights would have been historically premature. Note the flak he took even for speaking out against the Vietnam War — it was charged that he was overstepping his role and the war “was not his issue,”’ another blogger wrote chiming in on the debate.

If King were with us today he would be 87 years old. And had he not by now evolved on the issue of marriage equality, I think the Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice barring same-sex couples marriage licenses would remind him of back in the day of the three Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 when the state was the battleground in the fight for it’s African American denizens’ constitutional right to vote.

“Had [King] lived long enough, he would have taken some form of enlightened viewpoint regarding gay/lesbian rights. Personally, I speculate that probably he and his wife had private conversations regarding this issue, and I believe that Loretta’s unwavering support of GLBT rights throughout the rest of her life reflects the direction of those discussions,” a friend told me emphatically.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, The Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. She is the Coordinator of the African-American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at the Pacific School of Religion. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. She was recently named to MSNBC’s list of 10 Black Women You Should Know. Reverend Monroe is the author of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible Prayers for Not’So’Everyday Moments. As an African-American feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Her website is irenemonroe.com. Contact the Rev. Monroe and BC.