Kerry Compares Civil Rights Struggles of Gays, Blacks
By Patrick Healy, The Boston Globe Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...al/8134721.htm
Mar. 8--JACKSON, Miss. - During a campaign swing through Mississippi yesterday, Senator John F. Kerry excoriated President Bush from the lectern of a black church, insisted that New England has much in common with the Deep South, and decried the "crucifixion" of the young gay man Matthew Shepard as he compared civil rights for blacks to gay and lesbian rights.
Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, predicted that "a guy from Massachusetts" will beat Bush in the South in November, and spent the day quoting both Scripture and Bush's mantra of "compassionate conservatism" in denouncing the president for having, in Kerry's words, "the biggest track record of broken promises in history in all the time I've been in public life."
He also signaled a new aggressiveness as the Democratic standard-bearer, attempting to turn recent Republican attacks on his credibility and political consistency to his advantage by charging that the administration had "a Grand Canyon of [a] credibility gap" on a litany of foreign and domestic affairs.
"You talk about 'two positions'?" Kerry said, using a phrase that Republicans have hurled at him. "[Bush is] a walking stack of broken promises, and I'll lay them out to you over these next days. And he's got two positions on everything. We're going to create 4 million jobs; he hasn't, he's lost 3 million. He says we're going to have health care for Americans. Well, we're not, he doesn't have a plan for them."
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Kerry also said he would ask allies to go to Iraq to assess the conflict there for him, and added that he had not ruled out a trip to the war-torn nation himself.
The Massachusetts senator began his assault on Bush from the well of the Greater Bethlehem Temple Pentecostal Church of the Apostolic Faith, here in Mississippi's capital, as he read from the Book of James to suggest that Republicans did not back up "important words" with good works and social policy that aided Americans.
"You can run the list of those deeds that are not matched by words," Kerry said, including "compassionate conservative" among them. "I don't agree with the hollowness, nor do you, that tries to divide black and white, rich and poor, Massachusetts and Mississippi. In fact, some people just want us pointing fingers at each other. The reason they do that is that so no one points a finger at them." While invoking God at various turns yesterday -- at one point saying he had been "anointed the next president of the United States" after Bishop Phillip Coleman laid hands on him -- Kerry also cited the Bible and the US Constitution in defending the rights of gays and lesbians during a boisterous town hall forum after the church services.
Early during the forum's question-and-answer period, an African-American woman stood up and asked Kerry to take her side in insisting that the cause of gay rights should not be mixed with the civil rights movement.
The senator replied by briefly noting his support of preserving marriage for a man and a woman, but then began making a full-throated defense of civil rights for gays and lesbians -- recalling how minorities were once denied entrance to universities, and insisting that just as the Equal Protection Clause protected them, so, too, should it protect the rights of homosexuals.
At one point he compared the "crucifixion of Matthew Shepard," the Wyoming 21-year-old who was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die in the fall of 1998, with the dragging death of an African-American Texan, James Byrd Jr., whose murder earlier in 1998 sparked new efforts for hate crimes legislation.
Kerry, in his remarks, however, misstated Byrd's last name, and referred to Byrd's sexuality when he meant to refer to his race.
"Let me tell you something, when Matthew Shepard gets crucified on a fence in Wyoming because, because, only because he was gay," Kerry said, "and Mr. King gets dragged behind a truck down Texas by chains and his body is mutilated only because he's gay, I think that's a matter of rights in the United States of America." Despite the slipups, his remarks drew strong applause from the predominantly African-American audience of 700.
Kerry rallied the crowd to his side on a range of domestic issues, such as decrying the loss of some 2.5 million jobs under the Bush administration, and ridiculed Bush and his allies for continuing to predict with each passing month stronger job creation than pans out. "My mom told me that old thing, when you get in trouble, when you get down in that hole -- stop digging," he said.
At a news conference with reporters, Kerry also kept up the drumbeat of Democratic criticism that Bush is playing politics with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, most recently by using images of the World Trade Center's destruction in his reelection television ads. Kerry charged yesterday that Bush was "stonewalling" and "resisting" the inquiries of an independent commission investigating the attacks because of his reelection concerns.
"The president has purposely enlarged this big mandate, asked for things that we don't need or want, and pushed it off into 2005, which just happens, coincidentally, to not be an election year," Kerry told reporters here.
Kerry also told reporters yesterday that he would like to travel to Iraq on a fact-finding mission but worried about the "politicization" of such a trip. While he has not ruled out such a trip, he said he was inclined instead to ask a group of Democrats and Republicans to go there and offer their views to him afterward, as reported by Time magazine in its new edition.
"I'd like to see what the latest assessment is of people that I trust, of people whose experience and knowledge is significant, and have the ability to make some judgments about where we are today," Kerry told reporters during a brief news conference in a conference room at Tougaloo College. "I think that would be very valuable in the formulation of policy and in my ability to get important updates."
Kerry also said he planned to meet with former rival Howard Dean later this week in Washington, but that a date and time had not been set.
The senator has spoken with another former contender, John Edwards, and said he plans to meet with the North Carolinian at some point, too.