Bishop John Shelby Spong is speaking in Columbus, Ohio this Saturday. He is controversial in part because of his support for gay rights within the church, and also for his liberal, nonliteral interpretation of the Bible. I just found an interview he did in Australia back in 2001, and learned something I had not known about his long history of risk taking in the name of equal rights for all people:

David Weber asked Bishop Spong why the Ku Klux Klan once proclaimed him public enemy number one.

JOHN SPONG: That was one of my greatest honours. I lived in North Carolina, it was in the days of the civil rights movement and school desegregation and I spoke out against them and I was probably the only one in that little farming community that dared to do that.

I told the Sheriff that I planned to escort these little black children into the schools if he couldn't guarantee their safe delivery. He did guarantee their safe delivery. So the klan had a field rally and burned a cross and named me public enemy number one in Edgecombe County, and I was enormously proud of that.