Yet, what most of the people on my side of town don't know is that one of King's most significant sermons was given just north of here, right in the heart of the upper-class white neighborhood up on Mount Saint Alban, Washington's highest geographic point. Just four days prior to his death, King preached his last Sunday sermon from the pulpit of the great Washington National Cathedral, a sermon which King called "Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution."
Everyone knows today that King stood for justice and equality for the oppressed of the world, not just the Negro, not just the poor, not just the American. Certainly he was moved by the poverty and racism he saw in the rural South and in the northern ghetto, but he also traveled the world and he was just as moved by the incredible suffering he saw on the streets of Calcutta. He spoke out against injustice where ever he saw it and against violating the fundamental civil rights of human beings, regardless of what that compromised right was.I have, therefore, always wondered what Dr. King would have had to say about the Great Prejudice and Great Hatred of the American majority here in the early 21st century: the hatred of homosexuals. Unfortunately, there is nothing in his writings or sermons which says a thing about homosexuals. That isn't all that surprising, though, since homosexuality and gay rights were just not on the radar screen in the 1960s; in fact the Stonewall Riots didn't even take place until 1969, more than a year after King's death.
Actions, though, often speak louder than words, so let's put on our "WWMLKD" (what would Martin Luther King do) bracelets and look at the issue. Immediately we see an example from the historical record. When King organized the 1963 March on Washington, he put a man named Bayard Rustin in charge as chief organizer. Even from within King's own circle, this appointment was controversial because Rustin had been arrested and imprisoned multiple times for acts of homosexuality; nevertheless, King insisted that Rustin was the right man for the job. Obviously, King had no problem working with homosexuals and putting them in high profile positions of authority.
An FBI undercover agent managed to take a photograph of the infamous Mr. Rustin talking to King while King was taking a bath, and this photograph was widely used at the time by J. Edgar Hoover, Strom Thurmond, and others to make the charge that King himself was a homosexual. While we will never know whether or not King had homosexual relations with Rustin or anyone else, today it is believed that King was not a homosexual and those rumors were just a part of the FBI slander and smear campaign against King.
Now, the Religious Right has made a big deal out of saying that gay rights activists should stop comparing their struggle to the struggle of African-Americans to achieve equal rights, saying there's a "difference between God-designed racial distinctions and changeable, immoral behavior.” I suppose they forget that their God created about ten percent of His world population to be homosexual. Yet the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force makes a point to link the issues of African-American civil rights and gay civil rights. Why? Because King's widow, Coretta Scott King, told them to.
Mrs. King spoke to them in 1998, thirty years after her husband's death, saying, "I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.
"We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny....I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be....I've always felt that homophobic attitudes and policies were unjust and unworthy of a free society and must be opposed by all Americans who believe in democracy," she stated.
The charge is there. The authorization has come. Yet, how do homosexuals demand an end to injustice against them?
In his formative years, King was highly influenced by the statements of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. In 1924, Gandhi said, "I believe that it is impossible to end hatred with hatred." Gandhi, too, was driven by the goal of non-violence and submission to achieve social reform, lessons which King took to heart. Today, as homosexuals struggle with continued violence, hatred, and prejudice from the Evangelical Christian and Roman Catholic communities, and from literal murder at the hands of Islamic communities, homosexuals are challeged to meet these burdens with love and to affect social change through non-violent means. Gandhi himself once observed that Jesus Christ was the most active practitioner of nonviolence in the history of the world and the only people who don't know Jesus was nonviolent are Christians.
Throughout his religious career, King advocated non-violence as the way to move Negros, humanity, and civil rights forward. "For him, non-violent action was the opposite of passive. It was the most powerful human force, " King's biographer Stewart Burns wrote. King was convinced, Burns said, that "soul force"—assertive, nonviolent action—was more effective than violence in the long term.
And that gets us back to the National Cathedral sermon of March 31, 1968. Towards the end of his sermon, King made what is perhaps one of the most important summations of his career. Certainly it is not one of his most quoted "sound bites," but it is the true message he had for the world. He said, "It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence."
Nonviolence or nonexistence. Nonexistence.
Thus we come to my sermon—the message I have for gays and lesbians today fighting the fight for rights and acceptance. Those of you who enjoy playing the role of the public activist confronting the Fred Phelpses and the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons of the world can get plenty of advice for your jihad from the usual civil rights speeches and rallies, and I have little to add to that. Those I want to address today, however, are the more silent people, those who must remain discreet to keep their securitiy clearances or to keep custody of their children, to maintain their family ties or to maintain their incomes, to fit in with their suburban neighbors or to fit in with their religious groups. My message is simple: remember that you must be nonviolent to yourself.
How many of you are self-destructive? How many of you have attempted suicide? How many of you suffer from self-hate?
How many of you watch the beauty of young heterosexual love, see the hope and happiness of young families and their children, then launch into a night or even a weekend of serial promiscuity? How many times have you come home from dinner with your judgmental parents and gone straight to the bottle of vodka, downing it in one gulp? How many times have coworkers and sports team members joked around and made antigay remarks while you listened quietly, only to go home and seek the flagellation of the BDSM dominant? How many relationships have you had fall apart because society as a whole doesn't support gay relationships, but you don't mind because you're zoned out on drugs? How many of you have felt the ostracism of straight peers and sought the solace and acceptance of a group by "bug chasing" and intentionally trying to contract HIV? How many of you have been rejected by hypocritical bigots in your churches and rather than fight to educate them about what the Bible really says, you've simply separated yourself from the love of God?
Homosexuals have the highest per capita rate of psychiatric mood disorders of any group in the United States, and it's no wonder, given the constant pounding homosexuals receive from the Religious Right, the military, and the unenlightened and uneducated general population. When a person has to hide their true feelings and emotions, when they are constantly told they are "intrinsically disordered," that they are sinners or that they are a freak, when they must continually lie and prevaricate with friends and family, it's easy to be affected. It's hard to educate a religious public about the science behind the genetics of homosexual orientation when they are too busy supporting a mythology that asserts that the Earth is flat, or to explain that same-sex attraction is physiologically innate and not a "choice" when they are more worried about passing laws to teach creationism and intelligent design.
This may sound odd after just having said so much about Martin King and his message of nonviolence, but I want to give you a lesson from General George S. Patton: “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”
We cannot win the war if the warriors all commit suicide. In the face of all this violence, hatred, oppression, and bigotry, if we do nothing else, we must be committed to nonviolence to ourselves. That nonviolence requires us to avoid self-destructive behaviors. That nonviolence demands that we love and accept ourselves.
So many of my gay friends have become atheists or agnostics, even though they were raised in religious households. Some became that way because they were rejected by their faith community when they revealed their homosexuality. Some simply got tired of listening to the antigay rhetoric. Some chose to hide their feelings behind the veil of intellect and academic achievement, determining that no truly intelligent person should believe in the mythology of a god-race.
Well, I'm not here to convert people. Yes, I have my own personal religious beliefs and they happen to be primarily Christian, but I will be the first to admit that I believe in God, not in religion and not in the man-made rules of a denomination. In my own faith quest, I've studied my denominational beliefs and history, as well as those of many other faith traditions. I've also had the privilege of teaching religion from the secular perspective in public universities, which has made me expand my thinking well beyond simple Christianity or even Abramaic thought to include eastern philosophies.
What I am firmly convicted of today is that we simply cannot grasp or comprehend the will or the wonder of God. And, I certainly cannot see that any one set of religious or denominational beliefs is the one, true, correct Faith to the exclusion of all others. What I do see as a thread running through all of the great religions of the world, though, is the mandate to live in love, peace, and harmony with one another.
And thus we must try to live in love, peace, and harmony with all those good Christian people who would repress and deny us and with all those hatemongers who would strike and slay us, and, most importantly, we must live in love, peace, and harmony with ourselves, accepting the love of God and doing to ourselves nonviolence. As Martin King said exactly one year prior to his death, “Let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons and daughters of God."
We have been given our calling. Now, let us dedicate ourselves to love and nonviolence.
Amen.
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