I-677 Opposed By King’s Niece Homosexuality A Choice And Not A Civil Rights Issue, She Says

Human sexuality is a moral and not a civil rights issue, the niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said Wednesday in speaking out against a ballot initiative to ban employment discrimination against homosexuals.

Alveda Celeste King appeared along with about two dozen other leaders and members of black fundamentalist churches to oppose Initiative 677, which will be on the state’s November ballot. She said gay rights can’t be equated with the black civil rights movement.

“Alveda King loves all people. Alveda King wants civil rights for all people. I uphold equal protection under the law,” she said. However, she said the gay rights issue does not have “the innate and immutable” characteristics that marked the fight for black rights.

Being homosexual is a matter of choice, she said, and compared discrimination based on sexuality to that faced by people who are overweight or have blonde hair.

King said she was once denied a flight attendant’s job because she was overweight. “I felt pain. I felt suffering. But it wasn’t the same kind of pain and suffering that I felt as a person of color who the next day couldn’t take that away.”

King appeared on behalf of No Official Preferential Employment, the Committee to Defeat I-677. An hour before her news conference, Hands Off Washington, the group supporting the initiative, held its own news conference with other leaders of area African-American churches speaking in favor of the measure.

The initiative would give standing in court to sue for damages to people who believed they had been discriminated against based on sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation. Workplaces with eight or fewer employees would be exempt from the measure.

Despite that exemption, the measure would place an unnecessary burden on small businesses, King said, forcing them to deal with a moral question better left to families and churches.

“I believe that the gay lobbyists don’t want the homosexual community to know that there is another alternative lifestyle, and for those who say, ‘I was born this way,’ then we say, ‘You can be born again.”’ King, 46, of Atlanta, is the daughter of the late Rev. A.D. King, who, like his brother Martin Luther King, was a leader in the movement for black equality. She is a college teacher, writer and leader of King for America Inc., a civil rights group she founded.

Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, has endorsed a federal measure that would prohibit workplace discrimination because of sexual orientation, and told a news conference in June that her late husband would have, too.

“Like Martin, I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others,” she said.

Alveda King said she could not speak for her late uncle, “But I am very familiar with how he felt about the Bible and the standards of the Bible and he upheld those.”