“Ex-gay” singer Donnie McClurkin was cut from the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial concert in Washington DC recently, after activists pointed out his history of saying truly godawful things about the LGBT community, things which show just how far removed from the spirit of the Civil Rights movement he and other anti-gay folks really are. Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch grazes the tip of the iceberg of awful things McClurkin has said:
McClurkin has called homosexuality a “perversion” and a “curse,” scolded “evil young hard butch girls,” and described gay men as “vampires” and “vultures” who “prey” on children.
Of course, as Right Wing Watch points out, the “ex-gays” (all six of them, all being paid to be “ex-gay”) are whining that it’s not his history of hate speech that got him kicked out of a concert honoring a man who preached love and liberation (and who, by his own statements and those of the people closest to him — i.e., NOT his niece Alveda — would very likely at be at the forefront of the fight for LGBT equality if he were alive today), but rather the fact that he has been turned “straight.” For instance, here is PFOX, bellyaching:
The ex-gay group PFOX hailed McClurkin as a victim of anti-ex-gay discrimination. “Gays have more power than blacks in [Washington D.C.],” PFOX charged. “As shown with Donnie McClurkin, ex-gays are the most powerless and discriminated against minority in America today.”
Oh, dear God. This is like saying that unicorns are the most endangered species in the world.
Continuing the whine, as the headline implies, is Pastor Ken Hutcherson, the delusional Seattle area pastor who believes that he cost Microsoft either $30 billion or $30 million with his anti-gay activism (maths iz hard); who claims that he is the gayest person he knows; who claims that gays stole the rainbow from God and wants us to give it back; who performed Rush Limbaugh’s most recent traditional marriage; and who admits that he used to play football so that he could hurt white people legally. Ken will now mewl and cry for you, like the big tough guy he is, about how Donnie McClurkin was disinvited because nobody is important anymore, unless they’re gay:
Apparently the mayor of Washington, D.C., Vincent Gray, has forgotten his city’s history. When Gray was 20 years old, a Baptist minister by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people and delivered what is considered by many to be the most eloquent speech in our nation’s history. The message by this gifted orator was simple: He had a dream. And that dream was the insatiable hope that one day people would learn to look past a person’s skin color and see them for who they were on the inside.
But now that dream has been elasticized. It’s been rewritten and modified. That dream is no longer about ethnic equality; it’s broadened to include anything from sexual orientation to fighting for the rights of illegal immigrants. In short, King’s speech apparently had a few extra pages that he was even unaware of.
Ken cannot stand the idea that Dr. King’s quote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” might be taken literally, without making exceptions for Ken’s irrational bigotry.
To which we reply, “tough.”
You see, in the politically correct times in which we live, sexual orientation trumps everything.
My fellow brothers and sisters with darker pigmentation…
Perhaps you should write at a website other than World Net Daily if that’s your intended audience, Ken.
Unless you’re living a homosexual lifestyle yourself, you aren’t important anymore. Mayor Gray’s decision to ban a black gospel singer proves that civil rights have turned uncivilized. Let’s be honest: If it were up to Mayor Gray, Dr. King wouldn’t even be invited to this event.
Yes, he would. The only people who seem to have trouble with King’s all-encompassing message are anti-gay bigots and the racists who slither among them.
Look, maybe Mayor Gray is senile and his memory has faded in the past 50 years. Maybe he’s had a lot on his mind because he’s under investigation for a campaign finance scandal. Heck, maybe the mayor is on the down-low himself. Or maybe the ban on McClurkin is simpler than all of those things: Maybe Mayor Gray is too spineless to stand up to a homosexual lobby that limits free speech, bullies straights and tries everything it can to turn Dr. King into a queen.
It’s sad when people who have been victims of evil discrimination can’t find it in their hearts to care about the struggles of any groups besides their own. How selfish.
While I, personally, have always gone to great pains to assert both the parallels and the differences between the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for full LGBT equality, I do believe that the spirit of Dr. King’s message was, in part, that whoever you are, whether you are a victim of discrimination or a person of privilege — or both — that you have to look outside of yourself and be willing to stand up for those who are being oppressed who are different from you. So often, the oppressors are one and the same.
The most significant thinkers and leaders of the Civil Rights movement get this. The most thoughtful writers and activists in the LGBT rights movement get this. Hopefully, we’re all doing our best to listen to each other, work with and for each other and stand up for each other, and we’ll continue to do so, despite the challenges presented by insipidly hateful people like Ken Hutcherson.
