News Release
For Immediate Release:  January 17, 2011
Contact:  Diane Gramley  1.814.271.9078 or 1.814.437.5355

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Legacy Has Been Distorted

(Harrisburg) –   This week as we reflect on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we must also take a look at how his legacy has been distorted by homosexual activists desperate to claim their lifestyle is innate – that they are born gay and their fight for equality is no different than African Americans’ civil rights struggles.  The American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA), a statewide traditional values group, seeks to clarify that distortion.

“Comparisons between homosexual rights and civil rights have become increasingly common in recent decades. But that comparison is inaccurate as homosexuals have never been forced to drink from separate water fountains, sit at the back of a bus or theatre nor prevented from voting.  They are simply seeking special rights because of the sexual activity in which they engage or who they think they are,” noted Diane Gramley, president of the AFA of PA.

In its own Martin Luther King Day message, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s executive director Rea Carey invoked the civil rights leader.  “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,” she said.

In October 2009 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) announced the election of The Reverend Bernice King, the youngest daughter of The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (the organization’s founder), as its eighth president.  Rev. King has been vocal against so-called same-sex marriage and has said, “I know in my sanctified soul that he (Dr. King) did not take a bullet for same-sex marriage.”

Today participants in a press conference of African American leaders held in Chicago 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.”

At a MLK rally in Atlanta Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, cited her uncle’s advice columns written for Ebony magazine in 1957 and 1958.  “In advising men and women on questions of personal behavior 50 years ago, Uncle Martin sounded no different than a conservative Christian preacher does now,” she commented. “He was pro-life, pro-abstinence before marriage, and based his views on the unchanging Word of the Bible. Today, Planned Parenthood would condemn Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as part of the ‘religious right’.”

In one column he urged another reader to abstain from premarital sex, saying that such activity was contributing to “the present breakdown of the family.”

Liberals will point to the fact that one of King’s top advisers and organizers for the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, was an openly homosexual man as proof positive that King was in favor of homosexual marriage. The reality is, this example merely shows us that King was in favor of showing an attitude of love towards all people, regardless of their sexual orientation.

“This week as we can commemorate Dr. King’s successful fight for equality, we need to also recognize this assault upon his legacy.  This is a distortion of history and we need to step forward with the truth,” Gramley further commented.

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