Conservative activist and former Republican presidential hopeful Gary Bauer believes that Martin Luther King Jr. would not have supported same-sex marriage rights.
"There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that says that same-sex marriage has to be the law of the land," Bauer, who is the president of American Values and former president of the conservative Family Research Council, told Matthew Hagee on a Jan. 20 installment of "The Hagee Hotline," Right Wing Watch first reported.
Comparing marriage equality to abortion rights, he added, "I think we've seen is the concept of civil rights being hijacked by all kinds of people who, I believe, if Martin Luther King [Jr.} were alive today, he would be mortified by." He went on to note, "I think Dr. King, being a pastor, would've certainly understood the biblical definition of marriage, and I think he would've been a powerful voice ... for strengthening the family, for the need for children to be raised with mothers and fathers."
Bauer's remarks are in line with those he gave in a 2012 SiriusXM OutQ radio interview.
"The goal of the gay rights movement is to take a state that has same-sex marriage and to use that state as a battering ram and a lawsuit before the Supreme Court to force every state to have same sex marriage," he said at the time.
Although questions over what King's stance on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community would have been have long divided his family and followers, Coretta Scott King was an outspoken LGBT rights advocate before her death in 2006.
"Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union," King's widow told USA Today in 2004. "A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages."
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