christian soldiers

How Alveda King Is Shaming the Legacy of Her Uncle Martin

Well that was pretty disgusting, seeing Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Atlanta yesterday at the National Organization for Marriage’s tour stop.

Perhaps NOM’s most high-profile guest to date (where’s the Us Weekly crowd cheering for opposite marriage?!), Alveda stood before a still-slim audience and argued she wasn’t “ready to be extinct,” a phenomenon that would of course follow the legalization of same-sex marriage. “We don’t want genocide, we don’t want to destroy the sacred institution of marriage.” Alveda identifies with her lineage of “Christian soldiers,” not civil rights leaders.

But it was Alveda’s interview with Arisha Hatch from the Courage Campaign’s NOM Tour Tracker (embedded below) where she really stained the legacy of her name. As Alveda herself notes, she was the first person in the King family to get a divorce — obliterating the institution she now claims to so dearly defend. And yet her argument against marriage equality focuses on divorced couples, and single parents — rather than the loving families same-sex unions provide.

The best guard against extinction is marriage between one man and one woman raising those children. Statistics keep proving that when a male father and a female mother come together and they make a baby and raise the children, the children actually do better. They do better than families that are divorced, and I know that first hand. And so they do better when there’s a single parent, a mother or a father raising that baby, they just do. I’m really more concerned what’s going to be better for generations to come.

And as for the very court decisions her family’s work helped achieve? The ones that secured rights for blacks in America? Alveda says she doesn’t place her trust in the courts. Just in God. “The courts can’t help me. I have to go to the highest place.” OK! And would it be all right if the majority of whites had the chance to vote on black rights? It’s a question Alveda won’t answer, only to say that today, the majority of blacks would vote against same-sex marriage. As if that somehow excuses the idea of a majority voting on a minority’s civil rights.

Riddled with contradictions, Alveda’s logic — rooted, she says, in her uncle’s DNA — is so faulty that it’s not even her position on marriage that’s so offensive to the King legacy. It’s her grade school arguments.

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