by Soo Yang
As we commemorate the life and the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it is imperative to reflect upon the remarkable progress of tolerance in America and also the lingering injustice that must be confronted unconditionally.
In doing so, we all agree that King’s fearless, visionary spirit continues to inspire us to fight for equality, justice and freedom. However, our momentary sense of unity dissolves quickly under the heated disagreements regarding the connection (or the lack thereof) between the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and the gay rights movement of today. Essentially, the controversy boils down to the question of whether Rev. King, a Baptist reverend, would have supported the rights of sexual minorities if he were still alive.
His survivors, from his daughter to the late Coretta Scott King, have expressed widely divergent opinions about whether Dr. King would have supported the same sex unions.
However, the truth is no one truly knows whether Dr. King would have supported equality for homosexuals because he has never clearly articulated his views as he so eloquently did for other social issues. In some ways, his actions do somewhat vocalize his acceptance of homosexuals as fellow human beings. For example, Dr. King worked with Bayard Rustin, an openly gay man who taught Dr. King the notion of nonviolence and who helped him organize the landmark 1963 March on Washington, the revolutionary Montgomery Bus Boycott and even the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Despite Rustin’s status as a potential political liability, Dr. King continued to collaborate with him not because he was gay or black, but because he shared the vision of a more equal America.
This hypothetical question becomes even more controversial as religion is invoked. Seemingly, his deep Christian faith suggests Dr. King would have seen homosexuality as sinful in nature. Conversely, however, Dr. King’s own blatant skepticism towards the inerrancy of the Bible may imply he would have fought for gay rights.
However, these extreme views ignore the fact that both his religious faith and his secular humanism inspired him to fight injustice. His emphasis on compassion and nonviolence from the Bible was too progressive for many of his religious contemporaries, who attacked him not only for his views on racial equality but also on his liberal interpretation of the Bible. Dr. King used the Bible to defend the methods of peace, forgiveness and nonviolence that he employed in confronting racism, while his opponents used the same text to defend institutional racism. This ironic reality shows that the Bible can be easily exploited or embraced to defend varying conceptions of justice.
In essence, the Bible is a powerful text that can be used to for oppression and liberation, war and peace, corruption and integrity and hate and love. In light of this, I feel Dr. King would have used his religion as his moral foundation to fight against homophobia, which, like racism, is a product social conditioning, scientific misunderstanding and irrational fear.
Dr. King derived his fundamental philosophy of equality from the Bible’s indisputable morals of love, salvation and justice. He once declared, “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere,” promising to work tirelessly for full tolerance until all Americans would be judged beyond the external labels and according to the content of their true internal character. Although Dr. King’s work was specific to explicitly ending racism and segregation, in today’s climate, he would not have excluded the gay community from his vision of a more equal and tolerant America.
