Yall know I had to bring this thread back
I actually think it is absurd to compare anything about homosexuals to the civil rights movement...but the so-called similarities are now being argued...
Does anyone believe the two "movements" (and I use that term lightly in re: to the homosexuals...) are similar?
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SUNDAY March 07, 2004
Blacks divided on whether civil-rights fight, gay marriage are comparable
By Allen Breed
The Associated Press
When small-town Mayor Jason West started presiding over gay weddings, he saw it as nothing short of "the flowering of the largest civil-rights movement the country's had in a generation."
"The people who would forbid gays from marrying in this country are those who would have made Rosa Parks sit in the back of the bus," said the Green Party mayor of New Paltz, N.Y.
West's words have a strong resonance for gays and lesbians who feel their rights are being denied, but for blacks who worked to end racial discrimination in the 1950s and '60s, the reaction is decidedly mixed. Some civil-rights leaders find the comparison apt, but other blacks call it downright disgraceful.
"The gay community is pimping the civil-rights movement and the history," said the Rev. Gene Rivers, a black Boston minister and president of the National Ten-Point Leadership Foundation. "In the view of many, it's racist at worst, cynical at best."
The Rev. Joseph Lowery says American blacks should clearly sympathize with the gay community's fight for rights.
But Lowery, who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr., said the sheer weight of U.S. history precludes too close a comparison.
"Homosexuals as people have never been enslaved because of their sexual orientation," he argued. "They may have been scorned; they may have been discriminated against. But they've never been enslaved and declared less than human."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, while supporting "equal protection under the law" for gays, agreed that comparisons to the struggles of the civil-rights movement are "a stretch."
"Gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution," he said.
Another issue is that of choice, said D'Army Bailey, a marcher with the armed Deacons for Defense and Justice and a founder of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.
"I don't have a choice to be black and, therefore, had to be faced with the human rights battle from birth," said Bailey, a judge in Memphis.
Keith Boykin, a gay, black man, scoffs at the notion that sexual orientation is a choice. But even if it were true, he said, that's not the point.
"At the end of the day, it doesn't matter which group is most oppressed or whether they are identically oppressed," said Boykin, president of the New York-based National Black Justice Coalition. "What matters is that no group be oppressed."
© Copyright 2004, The Salt Lake Tribune.
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