‘The sight of the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. standing at her father’s grave site with thousands of demonstrators to denounce gay marriage was painful. The Rev. Bernice King and march organizers deliberately chose King’s resting place in Atlanta to imply that he would have stood with them. But Martin Luther King’s uncompromising battle against discrimination during his life—and his persistent refusal to distance himself from a well-known gay civil rights leader—show that King never would have endorsed an anti-gay campaign. It’s not the first time that a King family member has sullied King’s name and legacy to torpedo gay rights. In 1998, King’s niece, Alveda King, barnstormed the country speaking at rallies against gay rights legislation. In case anyone missed the King family connection, her group was named ‘King for America.’ Gay rights groups everywhere countered King’s ‘repent and save yourself’ message to gays by quoting a public statement King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, issued in 1996 in which she said that her husband would be a champion of gay rights if he were alive. In this case, King’s daughter was careful not to mention gay marriage in her talk. Her mentor and organizer of the march Bishop Eddie Long cautiously downplayed the issue, though media reported that Long’s Web site listed the promoting of a federal amendment against gay marriage as a major goal of the march. But Bernice King is an outspoken evangelical, and in the last couple of years she and other black evangelicals have marched, protested, written letters and petitions denouncing gay marriage. Polls show that black evangelicals’ hostility to gay marriage is much stronger than that of white evangelicals. In King’s day, gay rights were invisible on America’s public policy radar, and homosexuality in both black and white communities was hushed up. There’s not a word about homosexuality in any of King’s speeches or writings. There’s a way, however, to gauge what King’s feelings were on the issue, and that is the longtime personal and political relationship that King had with Bayard Rustin. Best known as the driving force behind the historic 1963 March on Washington, Rustin was a close King associate and a known homosexual.’