As I remarked early Sunday morning, the shuck-and-jive by Donnie McClurkin and his supporters has already started.
McClurkin, you will remember, was uninvited Saturday night from the 50th anniversary concert of the 1963 March on Washington.
Now I have said why I felt McClurkin should not have been invited in the first place. I also said that in the controversy, which was sure to follow, both McClurkin and his supporters will spin as if McClurkin is a victim of discrimination and intolerance because he considers himself as "delivered from homosexuality through Jesus."
The American Family Association's One News Now is claiming that McClurkin may have grounds to sue via an anti-discrimination ordinance. Of course this is nonsense. McClurkin himself, in a recent video, is claiming that he was "threatened and bullied."
Rod McCollum in his blog, Rod2.0, said:
McClurkin never fully explained the controversy behind his Washington D.C. booking and only provides an oblique, cursory reference. "This is all about a stand that I took," said the gospel legend and Pentecostal minister. "But I was never was derogatory against any lifestyle."
Donnie McClurkin is a liar. His stance has been extremely derogatory. The video above is him at a the 2009 COGIC Youth Conference. McClurkin is having what he seems to think is a religiously infused train of thought about the problems in the black community
But check out 6:17 when he begins harping on "feminine men." Then he says the following:
"No, no no. Don't applaud like it's a bash. It's because we failed. We failed! We didn't father our children."
Then later in the video, starting at at 8:38, McClurkin talks about how he was molested when he was eight-years-old. It's an awful story which he proceeds to make worse by linking pedophilia to homosexuality. It's a vulgar, disgusting ramble which McClurkin seems to be saying that existence of gay men is due to a lack of good parents and an abundance of evil predators.
I don't care how much screaming or talking in tongues he does, I don't care how "anointed" he is supposed to be, McClurkin doesn't know what he is talking about. My heart goes out to him. It was an awful thing what happened to him as a child but gay men are not the products of pedophilia or rape. It's an ugly thing to imply and for him to now claim that he has not been derogatory towards gays when we have the evidence on tape is sad.
As I said before, I had already given my opinion about McClurkin being uninvited. The 1963 March on Washington was coordinated and successfully engineered by an openly gay black man, Bayard Rustin, who had to stay in the background of the African-American Civil Rights Movement because of ignorance and homophobia.
In light of this, what in the hell was anyone thinking inviting someone like McClurkin to this celebration? It's an insult to not only Rustin's memory, but in light of hearing McClurkin's comments, the spirit of the 1963 March itself. The march was about freedom from ignorance and bigotry - two qualities which McClurkin demonstrated that he had so much of that they could have been oozing out of his pores along with the sweat.
But no matter how you feel about this controversy, count to yourself just how many times will McClurkin and his supporters address the ugly comments he made in the above video instead of playing the victim.
Count how many times McClurkin and his supporters will just happen to evade specific details regarding his rhetoric.
If you are truly a man of God, Mr. McClurkin, you shouldn't be afraid to address what you have said. You shouldn't run away from your words.
I, and so many others, await hearing from you, especially those "feminine men" you talked about.
Many of them happen to be very good friends of mine.
