Media, Politics, Society

“Ex-Gay” Gospel Singer Barred From Martin Luther King Anniversary Event

199955_159748477414952_1948853_nmlkihaveadreamgogoFifty years ago, Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gave his “I Have A Dream” speech and spoke of the day when people would be judged by the content of their character. I am not sure that the recent controversy over singer Donnie McClurkin is what MLK had in mind. McClurkin is a deeply religious man who says that God delivered him from being gay. That reportedly led to his being told that he was no longer welcomed at the anniversary performance of the speech.


McClurkin was scheduled to perform at the concert Saturday evening but gay rights activities objected to his participation ahead of the event.

Yet, Doxie McCoy, a spokeswoman for Mayor Vincent Gray, insisted that it was McClurkin who removed himself from the lineup to avoid controversy over his participation. She issued a statement that “[t]he Arts and Humanities Commission and Donnie McClurkin’s management decided that it would be best for him to withdraw because the purpose of the event is to bring people together.”

McClurkin however contradicted that account and said that he did not agree to be excluded. He states that he was “asked not to attend” the concert. That is quite a difference in accounts. Where the Mayor’s office is claiming that he removed himself, he is saying that he was barred because of his religious beliefs.

I can understand the feelings of gay rights advocates, particularly given the clear analogies of their own current struggle with the fight of Martin Luther King. However, the greater symbol of division can be found in barring people who share their admiration for MLK but subscribe to opposing religious views. I am equally concerned over what McClurkin is clearly suggesting is a false account from the office of Mayor Gray on the matter. The burden is now on Gray’s office to produce proof that the singer did opt not to attend to avoid controversy.

What do you think?


Source: Washington Post

338 thoughts on ““Ex-Gay” Gospel Singer Barred From Martin Luther King Anniversary Event”

  3. A stick figure really is an appropriate avatar choice for you. A simple, crude representation bereft of detail and nuance. The faintest outline of a real girl, but not quite whole or even remotely realistic.

  5. GeneH:

    Like her? Heck, I even buy some of her books! I love them! She has an incisive wit! No schmaltzy pissy moralizing like the pc crowd who, for example, do the St. Vitus dance over stuff like arresting park fairies. Or others, because a mugger gets shot.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  7. That you like a woman who boasts, “I’m a Christian first, and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don’t you ever forget it” says a lot about you, Sqweak.

    I’d say if you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. That’s a horrible thing to say about dogs. And fleas.

  8. @Elaine:

    Well, I like her! If she gets a few historical facts screwed up here and there, so what. Everybody does. Oprah and her “millions of lynched slaves” thingy. Obama and his “57 states.” Hillary with her “vast right wing conspiracy” stuff.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

    1. Squeeky if you can’t differentiate between a slip of the tongue, 56 states for instance vs lying, exaggeration, distortion and hatred you need to remove the word reporter from you signature

      1. leejcaroll wrote: “if you can’t differentiate between a slip of the tongue, 56 states for instance vs lying, exaggeration, distortion and hatred…”

        Have you ever listened to Ann Coulter? Reading her quotes out of context does not convey the message she is conveying. She is very sarcastic and funny. Anytime you lift sarcasm out of context and put it in writing, it is going to sound like the person is advocating the opposite of what they are advocating for.

        I’ve actually met Ann Coulter in person. She is a very nice person, much nicer than most anyone here seems to be (except maybe Squeeky). 🙂

        Lying… hatred? No, that is definitely not Ann. Exaggeration, distortion? Yeah, that’s her. She knows how to make a point, and her intelligence is way up there. Sometimes people just don’t get what she is really saying because she is so smart.

  10. Squeeky,

    More about Ann Coulter, the woman you chose to quote:

    Columnist Ann Coulter Defends White Supremacist Group
    Mark Potok
    Posted February 13, 2009
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-potok/columnist-ann-coulter-def_b_166871.html

    Excerpt:
    Rabid far-right commentator Ann Coulter is known across America for sliming everyone and everything she disagrees with. Al Gore is a “total fag” and another one-time presidential candidate, John Edwards, is the same. Democrats are “gutless traitors” and their convention a “Spawn of Satan” gathering. Muslims are “ragheads” and America should “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Jews are people who need to be “perfected.” The New York Times building and its editorial staff should be bombed. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens should have “rat poisoning” mixed into his food. Princess Diana “ostentatiously [had] sex in front of [her] children.” The Rev. Al Sharpton is “a fat, race-baiting black man.” President Bill Clinton was “a very good rapist,” and North Korea should be “nuked.”

    But despite denouncing school desegregation as a “spectacular” failure, Coulter has generally avoided bolstering white supremacist hate groups. Until now, that is.

    In her latest foaming-mouth tome — Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 — Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a “thinly veiled white supremacist organization.” Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.”

    Coulter could hardly be more wrong. And even if she can’t find time to read beyond a page of the CCC’s website, she really ought to know — after all, the organization where she frequently speaks, the Conservative Political Action Committee, has publicly banned the CCC from its annual gathering because it is racist. Also in the late 1990s, Jim Nicholson, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked GOP members to stay away from the CCC because of its “racist and nationalist views.”

    How could conservative Republicans be inspired to say such ugly things? Let us count the ways.

    The CCC’s columnists have written that black people are “a retrograde species of humanity,” and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes “forced integration” and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called gay people “perverted sodomites,” and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”

  11. David has been asked, by a number of us in one way or another, what his “agenda” is, why he is is expending so much time and energy trying to convince us of his position without any response..
    I asked a while back why he has been in so many situations where he was “confronted’ by homosexuals. He never replied.
    Seems to me something is afoot when someone uses so much energy in what is a fool;s errand, at least in this company. (And in general, too)

  12. More wisdom and quotes from Ann Coulter:

    “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

    “I’m a Christian first, and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don’t you ever forget it.”

    “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

    “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.'”

    Speaking of the 9/11 widows:
    “These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s deaths so much.”

    “I think [women] should be armed but should not vote…women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it…it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.”

    “It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 – except Goldwater in ’64 – the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted.”

    “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?'”

  14. Gene H.

    “Criticizing a concept by expressing a lack of understanding of the concept is fallacious.”

    I laughed so hard I nearly hurt myself.

    ===========================================

    Linguistic determinism regulates the individual’s entire range of possible cognitive processes. :mrgreen:

  16. In recent years, antigay activists have routinely asserted that gay people are child molesters. This argument was often made in debates about the Boy Scouts of America’s policy to exclude gay scouts and scoutmasters. More recently, in the wake of Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation from the US House of Representatives in 2006, antigay activists and their supporters seized on the scandal to revive this canard.

    It has also been raised in connection with scandals about the Catholic church’s attempts to cover up the abuse of young males by priests. Indeed, the Vatican’s early response to the 2002 revelations of widespread Church cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests was to declare that gay men should not be ordained.

    Public belief in the stereotype

    The number of Americans who believe the myth that gay people are child molesters has declined substantially. In a 1970 national survey, more than 70% of respondents agreed with the assertions that “Homosexuals are dangerous as teachers or youth leaders because they try to get sexually involved with children” or that “Homosexuals try to play sexually with children if they cannot get an adult partner.”1

    By contrast, in a 1999 national poll, the belief that most gay men are likely to molest or abuse children was endorsed by only 19% of heterosexual men and 10% of heterosexual women. Even fewer – 9% of men and 6% of women – regarded most lesbians as child molesters.

    Consistent with these findings, Gallup polls have found that an increasing number of Americans would allow gay people to be elementary school teachers. For example, the proportion was 54% in 2005, compared to 27% in 1977.

    Examining the Research

    Even though most Americans don’t regard gay people as child molesters, confusion remains widespread in this area. To understand the facts, it is important to examine the results of scientific research. However, when we evaluate research on child molestation, our task is complicated by several problems.

    One problem is that none of the studies in this area have obtained data from a probability sample, that is, a sample that can be assumed to be representative of the population of all child molesters. Rather, most research has been conducted only with convicted perpetrators or with pedophiles who sought professional help. Consequently, they may not accurately describe child molesters who have never been caught or have not sought treatment.

    Terminology

    A second problem is that the terminology used in this area is often confusing and can even be misleading. We can begin to address that problem by defining some basic terms.

    Pedophilia and child molestation are used in different ways, even by professionals. Pedophilia usually refers to an adult psychological disorder characterized by a preference for prepubescent children as sexual partners; this preference may or may not be acted upon. The term hebephilia is sometimes used to describe adult sexual attractions to adolescents or children who have reached puberty.

    Whereas pedophilia and hebephilia refer to psychological propensities, child molestation and child sexual abuse are used to describe actual sexual contact between an adult and someone who has not reached the legal age of consent. In this context, the latter individual is referred to as a child, even though he or she may be a teenager.

    Although the terms are not always applied consistently, it is useful to distinguish between pedophiles/hebephiles and child molesters/abusers. Pedophilia and hebephilia are diagnostic labels that refer to psychological attractions. Not all pedophiles and hebephiles actually molest children; an adult can be attracted to children or adolescents without ever actually engaging in sexual contact with them.

    Child molestation and child sexual abuse refer to actions, and don’t imply a particular psychological makeup or motive on the part of the perpetrator. Not all incidents of child sexual abuse are perpetrated by pedophiles or hebephiles; in some cases, the perpetrator has other motives for his or her actions and does not manifest an ongoing pattern of sexual attraction to children.

    Thus, not all child sexual abuse is perpetrated by pedophiles (or hebephiles) and not all pedophiles and hebephiles actually commit abuse. Consequently, it is important to use terminology carefully.

    Another problem related to terminology arises because sexual abuse of male children by adult men2 is often referred to as “homosexual molestation.” The adjective “homosexual” (or “heterosexual” when a man abuses a female child) refers to the victim’s gender in relation to that of the perpetrator. Unfortunately, people sometimes mistakenly interpret it as referring to the perpetrator’s sexual orientation.

    As an expert panel of researchers convened by the National Academy of Sciences noted in a 1993 report: “The distinction between homosexual and heterosexual child molesters relies on the premise that male molesters of male victims are homosexual in orientation. Most molesters of boys do not report sexual interest in adult men, however” (National Research Council, 1993, p. 143, citation omitted).

    To avoid this confusion, it is preferable to refer to men’s sexual abuse of boys with the more accurate label of male-male molestation. Similarly, it is preferable to refer to men’s abuse of girls as male-female molestation. These labels are more accurate because they describe the sex of the individuals involved but don’t implicitly convey unwarranted assumptions about the perpetrator’s sexual orientation.

    Typologies of Offenders

    The distinction between a victim’s gender and a perpetrator’s sexual orientation is important because many child molesters don’t really have an adult sexual orientation. They have never developed the capacity for mature sexual relationships with other adults, either men or women. Instead, their sexual attractions focus on children – boys, girls, or children of both sexes.

    Over the years, this fact has been incorporated into various systems for categorizing child molesters. For example, Finkelhor and Araji (1986) proposed that perpetrators’ sexual attractions should be conceptualized as ranging along a continuum – from exclusive interest in children at one extreme, to exclusive interest in adult partners at the other end.

    Typologies of offenders have often included a distinction between those with an enduring primary preference for children as sexual partners and those who have established age-appropriate relationships but become sexually involved with children under unusual circumstances of extreme stress. Perpetrators in the first category – those with a more or less exclusive interest in children – have been labeled fixated. Fixation means “a temporary or permanent arrestment of psychological maturation resulting from unresolved formative issues which persist and underlie the organization of subsequent phases of development” (Groth & Birnbaum, 1978, p. 176). Many clinicians view fixated offenders as being “stuck” at an early stage of psychological development.

    By contrast, other molesters are described as regressed. Regression is “a temporary or permanent appearance of primitive behavior after more mature forms of expression had been attained, regardless of whether the immature behavior was actually manifested earlier in the individual’s development” (Groth & Birnbaum, 1978, p. 177). Regressed offenders have developed an adult sexual orientation but under certain conditions (such as extreme stress) they return to an earlier, less mature psychological state and engage in sexual contact with children.

    Some typologies of child molesters divide the fixation-regression distinction into multiple categories, and some include additional categories as well (e.g., Knight, 1989).

    For the present discussion, the important point is that many child molesters cannot be meaningfully described as homosexuals, heterosexuals, or bisexuals (in the usual sense of those terms) because they are not really capable of a relationship with an adult man or woman. Instead of gender, their sexual attractions are based primarily on age. These individuals – who are often characterized as fixated – are attracted to children, not to men or women.

    http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html

    It was written by this guy . . .

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_M._Herek

    I dare say his credentials are far superior to yours, David.

  17. Hmmm. “Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas”??? Ann Coulter addressed that:

    Liberals don’t care. Their approach is to rip out society’s foundations without asking if they serve any purpose.

    Why do we have immigration laws? What’s with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards — why not make heroin legal? Let’s take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  18. I’d say that having a liberal outlook is a positive–not a negative–thing.

    liberal:

    – Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
    – Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the behavior and ideas of others; broad-minded.

    (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

    1. Elaine M wrote:

      —–
      I’d say that having a liberal outlook is a positive–not a negative–thing.

      liberal:

      – Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
      – Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the behavior and ideas of others; broad-minded.

      (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Langauge)
      —–

      Wow! After reading this, I really, really want to be a liberal. Where do I sign up?

      What? Oh, a voice from heaven just told me that a self-serving liberal wrote this. Oh yeah, now I see it. Free from bigotry! Not limited to authoritarian attitudes and dogmas. Ha-ha-ha-ha. If only it were true, we would all become liberals.

      I think Michael Savage had it right. Liberalism is a mental disorder.

      1. David wrote, after quotinig Elaine’s posting of the dictionary definition of liberal:
        Wow! After reading this, I really, really want to be a liberal. Where do I sign up?

        What? Oh, a voice from heaven just told me that a self-serving liberal wrote this.

        Ah so you know the people who authored the dictionary, David?

        (And yes I have listened to Coulter, for as long as I could stomach her. In context she is just as nasty, lying, distorting, etc as she is “out of context”

        If she doesn’t believe what she says but does it for entertainment she is in the exact same class as Limbaugh who has called himself an entertainer. The problem is Soupy Sales and Jerry Lewis, for instance, never had people follow them and their supposed philosophies slavishly as so many do with Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck et al.

        1. I really don’t understand admiring people who are mean. You can disagree with someone, politically, without name-calling and vitriol. Ann Coulter knows it’s theater. It’s too bad her admirers don’t.

  19. @David:

    Well, considering the liberal mindset, I would not be surprised to see stories about an influx of gay couples to various medical clinics complaining that their “natural” activities have not resulted in any pregnancies, and wanting to get their plumbing checked out. Obamacare will probably cover that.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  20. “Criticizing a concept by expressing a lack of understanding of the concept is fallacious.”

    I laughed so hard I nearly hurt myself.

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