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When you compare the Civil Rights Movement to the LGBTQ*? movement, expect critical backlash from Blacks as it happened on Tuesday with former RNC chairman Michael Steele and John Heilemann**. In fact, expect backlash from anyone who understands that the plight of Blacks in America is not the same for those who identify with being LGBTQ?. It's understandable why the LGBTQ? community would want to draw comparisons between its history and African Americans history. It's smart, too. For all intents and purposes, the Civil Rights Movement worked. African Americans mobilized themselves in the most hate-riddled pockets of the South and challenged discriminatory practices rooted in racism. And when images of Bull Conners ordering dogs and hoses on women and children reached the outside world, reasonable arguments in support of segregation flew out of the window and the emotional appeal to be treated as fairly and equally as whites opened the front door. People criticized movement leaders for using children in their non-violent tactics which they knew would be met with brutal force. I wouldn't have sent my 10 year old down to Birmingham but I would have been secretly proud of his defiance and his willingness to do anything to get Americans to see that Black people are people, too.
My mother grew up in Jim Crow south, in segregated schools even though she was born after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine and ruled segregation unconstitutional but acknowledged that de jure segregation was quite harmful to the Negro because it denotes a sense of inferiority. How right Chief Justice Warren was. In cases such as this one and Loving v. Virginia, Blacks (and whites) were not just fighting for civil rights; they were fighting to be equal in every frontier of American life. It wasn't just a fight for marriage, a fight for integrated public schools, a fight for counter service at Woolworth's, or a fight to walk through the front door. It was a fight for humanity. There is the distinction. There is one right, as far as I know, that the LGBTQ? community seeks; the right to be married. Because with it, a quiver of rights become available to them as they are to straight married couples. And I want this community to have this right to be married and its associated rights and benefits but I will bare my fangs if someone tries to cling onto the history, blood, sweat, and tears of my people.
That being said, I readily admit there are likenesses between African Americans and LGBTQs. As I mentioned in the above paragraph, one family had to take the right to be married to members of another race all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It wasn't until 1967 when the decision was handed down to repeal anti-miscegenation laws. Up until that point some states considered sex with Blacks an act of bestiality, sexual relations between a human and a lower animal. Anti-miscegenation laws were created to protect Whites from the threat of non-white blood in their families. States didn't just impose laws that prohibited whites from marrying Blacks, but it prohibited interracial marriage from whites and Asians, Filipinos, Indians, Native Americans, and Native Hawaiians. The good ole boys in Georgia were so lazy in their legislative language that they flat out prohibited All non-whites from marrying whites. Apparently, there was nothing more important to them than saving the family. The same is true today for conservatives who purposefully seek to preserve family and marriage by defining it in exclusive terms. However, the target in 2012 is the LGBTQ? community.
By 1967, 40 states had had anti-miscegenation laws in effect since the early 18th century. Frankly, I don't know how long sodomy laws have been on the books. My guess is since Biblical times. In 2003, the highest court in the U.S. ruled sodomy laws unconstitutional and repealed the laws in the 14 remaining states that held them. The fight for gay love, sex and marriage is finally turning a corner, with the recent decision ruling Prop 8 unconstitutional. I envision thousands of gay singles, lovers, parents, families with their family and friends in tow marching the Golden Gate Bridge hand-in-hand singing We Shall Overcome. This is a sweet victory in the fight for gay marriage and maybe 300 years from now, the Congress will authorize the month of May to be Gay History Month* and the rest of the society can
