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| Kecia Cunningham, a gay Decatur City Commissioner in Georgia,
said the gay rights movement can learn from the civil rights movement, but that
it is also easier ‘to discriminate against what you see’ when talking
about differences between the two struggles. (Photo by R.O. Youngblood) |
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| Editors’ note: This week, the Washington
Blade begins a series examining similarities and differences between the African-American
civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. Next week, a look at the role
of the courts and public opinion in both. |
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HOME > NEWS > NATIONAL NEWS
By: DYANA BAGBY and RYAN LEE COMMENTS
 
continued...
people is denied rights, whether it’s based
on race, gender or sexual preference, that is wrong. Discrimination to me is
still discrimination,” said Hutchinson, author of “The Assassination
of the Black Male Image.”
Pitts, a Pultizer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald who has discussed
the comparison in his writing, said the civil rights struggles for gays and
blacks haven’t played out the same way, “but in terms of striving
for some freedoms, they are similar.”
“What we have are two groups of people who have been historically marginalized
to a certain degree,” said Pitts, who is also the author of “Becoming
Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood.”
In the early days of American gay rights activism, the biggest obstacle preventing
gays from obtaining legal equality and societal acceptance was the view among
most psychiatrists that homosexuality was a sickness, said Jack Nichols, who
co-founded two chapters of the Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay rights group.
“I really see the psychiatric viewpoint as having originated in religion,”
Nichols said. “We knew we could get nowhere legally when people would
be turning to the shrinks to get their opinions of us.
“And we knew in terms of society, the religious angle was one which required
much more of a long-range approach, and as you can see it’s still going
on,” Nichols said. “I think things are now worse in terms of religion
than they were back then.”
Bayard Rustin was a gay civil rights
worker and pacifist who organized the 1963 March on Washington where trong>Martin
Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
But Rustin’s homosexuality often confined him to the margins of the
civil rights movement. (Photo by AP) |
Matt Coles, director of the ACLU’s Lesbian & Gay Rights Project,
said when there is resistance against broadening civil rights protections to
new groups, conservatives tend to focus on two themes: the group involved is
unworthy — such as psychologically flawed — and that inequality
is God’s law.
Traditional religious teachings and understandings have always been used against
gay men and lesbians, but only in the past 15 years have churches transformed
into political bases for opponents of gay rights, said Laura Montgomery Rutt,
media coordinator for Soulforce, a group dedicated to ending anti-gay “spiritual
violence.”
“I think the right wing — the James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells
— first started creating a kind of fear-based movement based on misinformation
about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and this movement ha
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