Who is our Martin
Luther King Jr. today?
When King was
assassinated in April 1968, the nation believed that
another person with his moral conviction and social gospel
ethic would not come along.
And in light of
today's queer civil rights struggles with members of
King's own family--like his niece Alveda King
saying queer civil rights are special rights, and his
daughter Bernice stating that her father did not take
a bullet for same-sex marriage--the LGBTQ community
must ask: Who is our Martin Luther King Jr. today?
However, much of
the reason the question is necessary is because
King's vision of justice and moral leadership is often
gravely limited by others and misunderstood. As a
matter of fact, too many people thought then, and
continue to think now, that King's statements regarding
justice and moral leadership were only about race and
the African-American community. They fail to see how
King's vision of justice and moral leadership was far
wider and challenging than we might have once
imagined.
For King, justice
was more than a racial, legal, or moral issue; justice
was a human issue and had to be addressed
anywhere it was being denied. And this was evident in King's
passionate concern about a broad range of concerns.
"The revolution for human rights is opening up
unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new
and wholesome healing to take place," King once told a
racially mixed audience. "Eventually the civil rights
movement will have contributed infinitely more to the
nation than the eradication of racial injustice."
Moral leadership
played a profound role in the justice work that King
did. As the nation looks for a new King, the LGBTQ community
need not look any further, because he is right among
us--the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson.
The tumultuous
events surrounding the election and consecration of
Robinson are the prism through which we see the Episcopal
Church's long struggle and history with
homosexuality. And we also get to see the
church's theological underpinnings upon which
homophobia and heterosexism have rested and
the continued ecclesiastical power to which it is
clamped.
Like King,
Robinson's moral leadership comes at a conservatively
recalcitrant time in U.S. history when the nation is once
again unabashedly discriminatory toward a segment of
its citizenry. And like King, who fought against a
broad base of social injustices, Robinson understands
that the struggle against homophobia in the Episcopal Church
is only legitimate if he is also fighting the racism in the
church as well as out in the world.
"King and
his era informed me firsthand about race in this country,
because I'll always remember seeing separate water
fountains," Robinson told me. "People
thought King was an agitator, and my father called King
a communist."
Today, according
to our country's morality jihadis like Focus
on the Family, the Family Research Council, and
Concerned Women for America, in addition to the
right-wing faction of the Episcopal Church, Robinson is
perceived not only as an agitator but also as the
foretold Antichrist.
Setting off an
international firestorm of reactions, both positive
and negative, that could possibly lead to a schism in the
worldwide Anglican Communion, Robinson's consecration
is nonetheless a symbol of gay liberation. It not
only challenges the church but also this
nation's existing discriminatory laws that truncate
our full participation in American democracy.
Elizabeth
Adams's book, Going to Heaven: The Life and
Election of Bishop Gene Robinson, depicts a man of
quiet dignity and humble beginnings who was born in
Kentucky to tobacco sharecropping parents.
Through
Robinson's life, Adams tells a wider
story--that of the Episcopal Church's
relevance in a postmodern world that is challenging not just
racial but other oppressions that have gone unexamined
and unaccounted for too long in this country and that
continue to create ongoing cycles of abuse and
discrimination for us all.
In his address
"Facing the Challenge of a New Age" before the
first annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social
Change in 1956, King stated that moral leadership is
predicated on doing selfless public service that will
not only ameliorate your immediate circumstances but also
change the world.
"The hour
calls for leaders of wise judgment and sound integrity,"
King said. "Leaders not in love with money but in love with
justice; leaders not in love with publicity but in
love with humanity; leaders who can subject their
particular egos to the greatness of the cause."
I miss King.
The nation misses King. And we all miss the resonance
of his voice heard in the inimitable rhetorical style of the
African-American tradition of speaking out against American
racism.
But today I hear
a new voice--Robinson's.
And it is a voice
that also resonates with the moral conviction and
social gospel ethic of King's, telling us in our ongoing
civil rights struggle: "Don't ever
forget the power behind you is greater than the
opposing force ahead of you."