Sexual behavior, the woman asserted on the Capitol steps in Sacramento, does not deserve the same protections as race. She was objecting to civil rights protections for persons attracted to their own gender.

Her statement stands in marked contradistinction to pro-gay civil rights sentiments which have long been on record as having been spoken or written by her famous aunt, the slain international hero's widow, Coretta Scott King.

Coretta Scott King spoke proudly before Congress in support of ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (to protect gay men and lesbians against unwarranted job losses) now said to be facing hurdles in a largely hostile right wing U.S. Congress which looks askance at granting equal employment rights to all Americans. She said:

"I am proud to join in supporting this much needed legislation, which would provide some long-overdue protection to American workers from the injustice of discrimination based on sexual orientation."

"I am proud to stand with this overwhelming majority of Americans who recognize the justice of this cause."

"I support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 1994 because I believe that freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. As my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere." On another occasion he said, "I have worked too long and too hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible.' Like Martin, I don't believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others."

"I see this bill as a step forward for freedom and human rights in our country and a logical extension of the Bill of Rights and the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. The great promise of American democracy is that no group of people will be forced to suffer discrimination and injustice. I believe that this legislation will provide protection to a large group of working people who have suffered persecution and discrimination for many years. To this endeavor I pledge my whole-hearted support."

King's niece, on the other hand, told California listeners, "No one is enslaving homosexuals...or making them sit in the back of the bus." She said "In California, injustice is being done to family values," because state laws are being passed prohibiting anti-gay discrimination.

To buttress her uncharitable outburst, the King niece said that openly-lesbian California Assemblywomen, Carole Migden, D.-San Francisco, and Sheila Kuehl, D.-Santa Monica, represented "forces that want to steal away the civil rights from under our very noses."

Ms. King, responded Assemblywoman Kuehl, is attempting to make it seem that other civil rights leaders feel it inappropriate to compare the struggles of the gay and lesbian community with the African-American civil rights movement."

Kuehl knows, in fact, that African-American civil rights leaders such as The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and former Atlanta Mayor and U.S. United Nations delegate, Andrew Young, another King associate, have both spoken out repeatedly on behalf of gay civil rights. Jackson has appeared as a featured guest speaker and as a representative of the Rainbow Coalition at the largest gay and lesbian marches on Washington. He waxes eloquently on gay rights.

The King niece's words about gay men and lesbians, may, someday, upon her further investigations into the history of her uncle's 1950s/1960s movement, cause her at least some mild embarrassment over what she has said.

It is clear, for example, she's failed to encompass in her view such early 1960s crusaders as white and gay black civil rights advocates like Pat Cusick, who put his body up against racist front lines, and whose gripping history is told in a highly-acclaimed southern history to be published in mid-September: Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968 by James T. Sears, a professor at the University of South Carolina.

Photographs in this soon-to-be-published work show the seated white/gay Cusick, in brotherhood in North Carolina at a 1962 sit-in, close alongside protesting black activists.

Episodes such as this caused the more knowledgeable Coretta Scott King to blast, in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court's anti-gay decision, saying she knew that gay people had worked assiduously in the black civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. She told a same-sex loving assembly of listeners:

"I am here tonight to express my solidarity with the gay and lesbian community in your struggle for civil and human rights in America and around the world. I believe all Americans who believe in freedom, tolerance and human rights have a responsibility to oppose bigotry and prejudice based on sexual orientation."

* Assistance provided by Rex Wockner and John Aravosis