Fox News has hired Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to “provide social and cultural commentary” for the network as a contributor. King is an extreme anti-LGBT activist who has compared same-sex marriage to genocide and claims homosexuality is a “knockoff” sexuality created by the devil.

On March 6, Fox News announced that it signed King as a contributor to “provide social and cultural commentary” for the network. Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes touted King's “passion and mission for social change” as a “valuable contribution” to the network.

But unlike her uncle, Alveda King -- who goes by “Dr. King” after receiving an honorary degree from Saint Anselm College -- is primarily known for her work as a right-wing activist, including her extensive opposition to LGBT equality and reproductive freedom. King currently serves as the Director of African-American Outreach at the anti-choice organization Priests for Life, and previously served on the boards of multiple conservative organizations, including Heartbeat International, Georgia Right to Life, and Abortion Recovery International.

King's decade plus history of speaking against LGBT and reproductive rights has won her praise among conservative. She was a featured speaker for Glenn Beck's 2010 “Restoring Honor” rally in 2010, and has previously been a frequent guest on Fox. In a Salon profile detailing Beck's love for King, Loretta J. Ross, a black reproductive rights activist, noted that conservatives have recruited King “to be a front, to be a face ... It's a culture war wedge, to try to use gay rights and abortion as a way to build rifts in the black community.”

King's Anti-LGBT Extremism

King's anti-LGBT extremism is rooted in her radical opposition to reproductive freedom. She sees “homosexuality” as one of the heads on a "three-headed monster" representing “a triple threat in the form of black genocide” (the other two heads of this monster are racism and abortion rights). While King asserts that she does not “hate homosexual people” and maintains she adopts the “hate the sin and love the sinner” practice, she has a long history of preaching anti-LGBT rhetoric and lobbying for anti-gay groups.

Photo credit: Alveda King's blog

King is perhaps best known by LGBT activists for a speech she gave at a 2010 rally for the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage, during which she linked same-sex marriage to genocide:

KING: It is statistically proven that the strongest institution that guarantees procreation and continuity of the generations is marriage between one man and one woman. I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to be extinct and none of us wants to be. So we don't want genocide, we don't want to destroy the sacred institution of marriage.

But King's homophobic extremism has a richer and deeper history. King has equated same-sex marriage with polygamy and “self-destruct[ion]” and argued that natural disasters are the result of “homosexual marriage” and abortion. In January, King completed a three-part commentary defined homosexuality as a “counterfeit model” made by the devil (emphasis added):

IMPORTANT - GOD didn't design homosexuality. The meddling USURPER stole the keys to the laboratory, made KNOCKOFFS and goofed up perfection. He tried to make the unnatural a natural thing. Don't blame GOD! [...] To make matters worse, the counterfeit models are plagued with so many other viral issues, like adultery, fornication, child molestation and abuse, burning lust, subsequent mental and physical attacks, and on and on and on. Truly the counterfeit models that war against the original procreative design are fraught with issues.

King claims to empathize with LGBT people by equating being gay with her own difficulties losing weight, claiming that just as the devil made people gay, the devil also made her fat (emphasis added):

I am struggling with my weight, and no, I don't want to be fat. And no, God didn't make me fat. Evil forces as old as the Garden of Eden tricked me into certain behaviors and decisions that have impacted my weight. [...] So, does that mean that the same is true for someone who struggles for, say, a taste of homosexual passion in their flesh? Absolutely!

King also edited an anti-LGBT book entitled Life at All Costs: An Anthology of Voices from 21st Century Black Prolife Leaders. The anthology, which King praised as “the civil rights legacy,” devotes an entire chapter to “Why Homosexuality is Wrong,” that links homosexuality to pedophilia by suggesting that gay men might be “predator male[s] seeking to gratify [their] unnatural sexual urges upon the innocent.”

Relationship With MLK

King draws on her relationship with her uncle to legitimize her extremist agenda, arguing that MLK would have opposed same-sex marriage and would not have "embraced the homosexual agenda that the current NAACP is attempting to label as a civil rights agenda."

In 1997, King toured the country condemning gay rights, stating that she was “very familiar with how [MLK] felt about the Bible and the standards of the Bible.” At a rally in San Francisco, she declared: “To equate homosexuality with race is to give a death sentence to civil rights. No one is enslaving homosexuals...or making them sit in the back of the bus.”

Photo credit: The Advocate

Her anti-LGBT extremism has put her at odds with MLK's late wife, Coretta Scott King, who was a vocal proponent of LGBT equality. Alveda King feuded with Coretta Scott King over gay rights, directly attacking Correta for her support of LGBT equality in a 1994 letter, saying it would bring “curses on your house and your people ... cursing, vexation, rebuke in all that you put your hand to, sickness will come to you and your house, your bloodline will be cut off.” Alveda has also dismissed her aunt's positions, stating “I've got his DNA. She doesn't, she didn't... Therefore I know something about him. I'm made out of the same stuff.”

King has also feuded with the NAACP over its support for marriage equality. In 2012, she recorded a radio commercial for Maryland Marriage Alliance in which she decried the NAACP's support of gay rights as an “unholy alliance.”

On Fox News, King will likely continue her work opposing basic legal protections for LGBT people, especially considering Fox's ongoing defense of businesses who refuse to serve gay customers. On March 2, days before announcing her new role at Fox, King spoke at a March 2 Georgia “Religious Freedom Rally” in support of passing Georgia's SB 129 -- a “religious freedom” bill that would create a broad license to deny service to LGBT people on religious grounds. King read from MLK's 1967 sermon “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool,” after which she invoked MLK's legacy to support the measure:

KING: [MLK] is the son of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., my granddaddy, the brother of my father Reverend A.D. Williams King, the uncle of Evangelist Alveda King. I want to urge you today to pass the religious liberty bill. [...] So I want to urge you to remember the God of Martin Luther King Jr., the Lord of Martin Luther King Jr. Jesus Christ. Holy spirit, I ask you to support the religious liberty bill. [...] We still have a dream and it is rooted in the American dream. And together we must stand, so please stand and make sure that we pass religious liberty bill.

Similar laws are now emerging in states across the country, thanks in part to Fox News' championing of anti-gay business owners whose “religious freedoms” are allegedly threatened by LGBT equality. Given her uncle's legacy, King offers the network a chance to further disguise this kind of anti-LGBT discrimination as a fight for the “civil rights” of anti-gay Christians. Expect to hear a lot more about MLK's legacy on Fox News, especially when it's used as a tool to legitimize his niece's vile and extreme anti-LGBT ideology.