CNN sums it up:
Former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford announced Sunday that he is marrying a man 50 years his junior, almost 20 years after his wife died.
Wofford, a Democrat who was also a top adviser to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., announced his marriage to Matthew Charlton in a New York Times op-ed published Sunday.“Too often, our society seeks to label people by pinning them on the wall — straight, gay or in between,” Wofford wrote. “I don’t categorize myself based on the gender of those I love. I had a half-century of marriage with a wonderful woman, and now am lucky for a second time to have found happiness.”
Wofford’s biography on Wikipedia notes:
Wofford first met John F. Kennedy in 1947 at a party at Clare Boothe Luce’s Connecticut home. Wofford’s political career began in 1960 when Kennedy asked him to join his presidential campaign and work with Sargent Shriver on winning over the “Negro vote”. When King was imprisoned shortly before the election, Wofford and Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who faced the specter of her husband sentenced to hard labor in a Georgia prison for a minor traffic violation while she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. This prompted Martin Luther King, Sr. to switch his endorsement from Richard Nixon to Kennedy and was done without the knowledge of Ted Sorensen, Ted Kennedy and Kenneth O’Donnell. All of them would have opposed this move in fear of criticism from Southern political leaders such as arch-segregationist Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. That Kennedy had called King’s wife was subsequently leaked and may have shifted the African American vote in Kennedy’s favor nationally, to which many attribute his slim victory over Nixon. He began his public service career as a legal assistant for Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh on the United States Commission on Civil Rights, serving from 1957 to 1959. In 1959, he became a law professor at University of Notre Dame. He was an early supporter of the Civil Rights movement in the South in the 1950s, accompanying Indian activist Ram Manohar Lohia on a tour of the South in 1951 and becoming a friend and unofficial advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. Wofford was raised an Episcopalian, and converted to Catholicism in the 1980s.
If anyone needs a primer on the Church’s teaching on same sex marriage, you’ll find a good one right here.
Photo: The White House
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