Ultimately, it's speculation and the question can't be answered by either side, although I can understand the temptation to claim Doctor King for your position (whatever your position might be).

Surely King's collaboration and friendship with Bayard Rustin give a pretty good pointer.

I'm with Chris on this. People don't have to agree with every single point to come together to work on common causes, so I don't agree that it's a pointer in any direction. There is a good friend of mind in my parish who is gay, and we talk all the time, share meals,etc. That doesn't mean I'm going to a pride parade.

1. Given Dr. King's own well-documented issues with marital faithfulness and sexual immorality, I'm not sure why he would have a right to offer an opinion, much less why anyone else would want to claim his assumed opinion on sexual morals with any kind of integrity.

2. I'd recommend reading "Same-Sex Relationships in the Life of the Church", offered by the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops. The document presents both sides of the issue, but the conserving case offers a particularly clear differentiation between the gay rights movement and other human rights movements. The paper rightly points out that the evils of slavery, racism, unjust war, discrimination against women, etc. are all events that came into being after The Fall, and are thus imperfect and unjust states. Heroic fights by activists against these evils and toward justice are thus virtuous, since in each case the goal has been a return to the pre-Fall condition. (In fact, one could argue that a good definition of "justice" itself, is a return to Eden prior to The Fall, whatever the issue.) There was no slavery, racism, war, or sexual discrimination prior to The Fall. However, there were also no same-sex relationships, only (first) singleness, and (second) marriage between one man and one woman. Since same-sex relationships developed after The Fall, they are thus subject to the imperfection and injustice of its distorting power. Any movement FOR gay rights is a movement away from Eden, not toward it, and is thus a movement AGAINST justice. This is why the black church--with integrity--can disapprove of any parallels drawn between gay rights and the struggle for racial equality.

John Campbell

Framing the discussion in terms of a Stone Age fairy tale certainly makes sense.

John,

Your second paragraph, while logical, suffers from being fraught with two assumptions that I find extraordinarily questionable. The first is that the only way to understand the end of salvation through scripture is as a return to the Garden in Genesis. One clear line against this is the image of the New Jerusalem (the "Heavenly City") in the eschatology of Revelation.

But second and more troubling to me is the apparent assumption that black churches as a whole adopt only one hermeneutic, one way of reading Scripture, and could therefore find, as a whole, "integrity" in the argument you outline here.

There is great theological diversity in black churches just as there is in any other ethnic/religious community. And there is a diversity of reasons for both rejecting and accepting the justice arguments around same-sex marriage. In my view, each argument is best addressed on its own merits.

It is simply not possible (I would argue it may even be prejudicial) to collapse the perspective of an entire community into a single, narrow theological argument to reject the relationship between the justice movement for same-sex marriage and the civil rights movement.

For those of us who don't know, Bayard Rustin was gay and King knew it.

Personally, I'm sure King would be on the pro LGBT side. Rauschenbusch offers a compelling argument for. I'm sure someone could come up with an argument against.

However, I feel quite mixed in invoking King to support causes he didn't weigh in on, and I feel a bit similarly with historical figures. I've preferred to leave historical figures to their times in public discourse, if possible.

For example, Oscar Romero+ became a staunch advocate for justice ... but he would have been a staunch opponent several key (imo) reproductive freedoms and LGBT causes. His opposition would have been inexorable, because of his church, although he might well have downplayed that side of things. Had he been Anglican, he might be different, but he is not Anglican.

Then again, it's all but certain that Jesus would have Occupied Wall Street. Why He would have done so is self-evident to anyone who doesn't work in or profit from the financial system, or even from some within in: a small class of people have gradually been expropriating more and more wealth, making the economy more and more vulnerable to financial panics, and yet they tell us everything is fine and it's Communism to stop us, and if things really come to a head you should let the banks just go bankrupt. Except that when things did come to a head, letting one bank go led to another one going, so the government intervened to stop it, and then any subsequent attempts by the government to restrain the financial sector were decried as Communism. A bit like the money changers at temple, profaning a sacred place by exploiting people financially. Jesus took a whip to the latter, so what would he have done to the former?

(In fact, one could argue that a good definition of "justice" itself, is a return to Eden prior to The Fall, whatever the issue.) There was no slavery, racism, war, or sexual discrimination prior to The Fall. However, there were also no same-sex relationships, only (first) singleness, and (second) marriage between one man and one woman. Since same-sex relationships developed after The Fall, they are thus subject to the imperfection and injustice of its distorting power. Any movement FOR gay rights is a movement away from Eden, not toward it, and is thus a movement AGAINST justice.

There is nothing in the Hebrew text of the story of Eden in Genesis that supports your interpretation John Campbell. A thorough probing of the story of the humans in the garden, especially a probing of the original language and the very specific Hebrew terms used to designate them, leads one to understand that the first human that God created and then later the companion God made so that human was not alone, were very different creatures than the two expelled from the garden "after the Fall." The help mate that God gave to the first human was identical to it, it was a clone. There was no death at that point in the story, there was no need for procreation and there was no gender differentiation, and yet it was at that point that God gave one to the other as a pair bond.

It was after "the Fall" that procreation was introduced and the task of physically bearing human offspring was given to Eve as her punishment for her part in bringing about "the Fall." It is perhaps because of the facts of the story in the Hebrew that when Jesus was asked regarding who would be someone's spouse at the resurrection that he answered that there would be no marriage, there would no longer be a need for procreation, things would again return as they were before the Fall, as Paul said, neither male nor female.

Brother David

the conserving case offers a particularly clear differentiation between the gay rights movement and other human rights movements. The paper rightly [?!?] points out that the evils of slavery, racism, unjust war, discrimination against women, etc. are all events that came into being after The Fall

Is this for real? What House of Bishops wrote this, 1912?

[Seriously, IIRC, isn't this from about 20 years ago? At any rate, it's embarrassing in 2012.]

JC Fisher

Some interesting comments here. (Frankly, some embarrassing comments as well...)

I think one thing that shines through is the uncertainty people are expressing towards speculating about what a person from history would think about a time beyond their own.

Well, of course it is "unanswerable" as far as accurately saying someone's position with certainty.

However, I find it a helpful exercise to move beyond "said/didn't say" arguments to answer what someone would think today, and to instead explore the core principles that led one to reason, live, and change in their own lifetime, in order to make helpful observations for today.

Rauschenbusch does this well in his article in his illustration concerning his great-grandfather, and the way King spoke of him despite his early 20th century world view. From the article, King wrote on preacher Rauschenbusch:

"'Rauschenbusch gave to American Protestantism a sense of social responsibility that it should never lose. The gospel at its best deals with the whole man. Not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well being but his material well-being.'"

"Yet what King politely omitted was the relatively scant attention Rauschenbusch paid to the question of racism. While he decried slavery and Jim Crow as a modern-day sin, Rauschenbusch never addressed racism squarely, and at some points expressed a world view whose racism makes one cringe in embarrassment."

King saw what Rauschenbusch stood for, and applied that wisdom and interpretation to the events of his day.

It is a fair argument by the author to see in King's life that the basic principles lead to a conclusion that "...he knew that the core of the Gospel was justice, dignity and freedom for all people."

Whether or not King himself would have "evolved" is less of the real issue than understanding that King's Gospel was about justice, dignity, and freedom for all people.

JC,

The materials in question are papers written by theologians on both sides of the same-sex marriage question requested from the House of Bishops theology committee and presented to the House in 2010. Both papers were published side-by-side in Anglican Theological Review in full last year, and the Lead reported on their circulation with links here:

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/episcopal_church/house_of_bishops_posts_samesex.html

As far as the quality of the arguments made, the readers can decide for themselves!