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Homosexuals Hijack Civil Rights Bus 3/22/2004 A. Civil rights leaders and others have denounced the comparison of a "right" to same-sex "marriage" to the civil rights movement.
"I am tired of sitting at the back of the bus," said one 37-year-old California man who recently went to San Francisco to "marry" his male partner. "Rosa Parks didn't wait for the courts to tell her it was all right to ride in the front of the bus," according to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, explaining why he authorized the city to give "marriage" licenses to same-sex couples.
Robert Oliver, a black resident of Chicago, excoriates the analogy with rhetorical flourish:
When has a multitude of gays been kidnapped and made to be slaves for 400 years? When was it illegal to teach gays to read and write? When were there ever any gay Jim Crow laws? When were gays required to say "sah" or "ma'am" to straight people? When were there separated gay and straight water fountains? In public buildings, when were there separate entrances for gays and straights, the gays going out the back? In theaters, have gays been forced to sit in the balcony while the straights sit on the main floor? When were there segregated lunch counters based on sexual preference? When was a gay required to give up their seat on a bus to a straight person? Who was the gay Rosa Parks? Were gays at the bottom of the economic social structure for decades? Where were the poor gay ghettos? When have gays gotten worse jobs and lower pay than straight people? When were there separate-but-equal schools for gays and straights?
Black civil rights leaders have also expressed strong condemnation of attempts to hijack the civil rights movement. "We find the gay community's attempt to tie their pursuit of special rights based on their behavior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s abhorrent," Bishop Andrew Merritt of Straight Gate Ministries and several other Detroit pastors said recently in a statement supporting traditional marriage. "Being black is not a lifestyle choice."
"While some gay-rights supporters have compared their efforts to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, a number of blacks have rejected that comparison, including members of the [Lakeland Interdenominational Ministerial] Alliance . 'I'm offended. Don't ever compare the two," said the Rev. Arthur Johnson, pastor of St. Luke's Ministries. … 'I've never seen any homosexuals who had to go to the back of the bus because they're homosexual.'"
The Rev. Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, Washington, is a former profootball player and black man in an interracial marriage who rejects any comparisons between the civil-rights and gay-rights movements. "Even when people of different races were prohibited by law from marrying, he noted, 'it didn't redefine the institution of marriage. This is not equal rights. It's not about civil rights. It's about people living in sin and trying to be justified by a society that says it's wrong.'" [Read more ...]
The CWA paper "Homosexuals Hijack Civil Rights Bus" is available for the Web via Adobe Acrobat. The Acrobat Reader is available for free by clicking the button below.
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