Black & Gay Civil Rights

Blacks in America are not generally very supportive of gay rights. They are, in fact, more homophobic than most of the population - gays in the black community are much more likely to be in the closet, much more likely to be in denial, and much more likely to contract AIDs. This is very unfortunate because gays are fighting for the same sorts of basic liberties that blacks fought for a few decades ago.

Leonard Pitts writes for the Miami Herald:

Granted, the comparison between the black struggle and the gay one is inexact. But here's the thing: Every freedom movement from Poland's labor uprising to America's feminism to China's Tiananmen Square protests has been compared to the civil rights movement. When Czechoslovakians threw off communist rule in 1989, they sang We Shall Overcome. Yet no one bothered to point out that the Czechs were never slighted in the U.S. Constitution, much less to accuse Poles of ''pimping'' the civil rights movement. What's that tell you?

It tells me this stinginess about the movement arises only when gays seek to embrace it. And that black people -- some of us, at least -- ought to be ashamed. How can we of all people, we who know the weight of American oppression better than almost anyone, stand in the path of those who seek simple equality? How can we support writing anyone out of the Constitution when it took us so long to be written in?

And how can we stand with the very people -- social conservatives -- who not so long ago didn't want us in their churches, their schools, their parks or their restaurants? Yet more and more, we act and sound just like them. We use our Bibles to justify our bigotry, just as they did. We describe equality as unnatural, just as they did. We invoke the sanctity of tradition, just as they did. And we are wrong, just as they were.

As Pitts points out, the struggle of gays and lesbians in America is not the civil rights movement, but it is a civil rights movement - and, hence, something that blacks should embrace and support, not oppose. Too many blacks are simply on the wrong side of this, and for reasons not at all unlike why many whites were on the wrong side of civil rights back in the 60s.

Read More:

• Ethics of Gay Marriage
• Separation of Church and State 101
• Religious Right
• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality