Sep 10, 2004  |  By: DYANA BAGBY and RYAN LEE | COMMENTS     

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson remembers going to a movie theater in Alabama as a child and being forced to sit upstairs in the “colored” section.

“I was so hurt by that, I never went back,” said Peterson, founder of Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, a Los Angeles-based religious non-profit that focuses on personal development for urban males.

To be judged by the color of his skin shook Peterson to his core, prompting him to join protests in front of city halls throughout Alabama, raising his voice to demand equal rights.

But today Peterson, 55, considers some former leaders of the civil rights movement — including Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta and Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow — “a disgrace to blacks, whites and Jews who died [during that time].”

Watching icons of the civil rights struggle draw comparisons between black people’s fight for the right to vote, to attend integrated public schools and to sit at a lunch counter, and today’s gay rights movement, including the current push for same-sex marriage, fills Peterson with “disgust,” he said.

“There is [no comparison] at all. Homosexuality is not about love, civil rights, family — it’s about sex and nothing else,” Peterson said. “I’ve counseled men and women who have overcome their homosexuality. I’ve yet to see someone overcome being black.”

Joining Peterson and other African Americans who are offended by comparisons between the gay rights and civil rights movement are many white religious conservatives, including the Washington, D.C.-based Concerned Women for America.

In March, the CWA’s lead attorney, Jan LaRue, wrote a paper titled, “Homosexuals Hijack Civil Rights Bus: Claiming A ‘Civil Right’ to ‘Marry’ the Same Sex Demeans a Genuine Struggle for Liberty and Equality.”

Even some black gays are uneasy about too closely linking the two struggles for equality.

“These [movements] are similar to me, but many people in the gay community make the mistake of saying they’re the same,” said Pat Hussain, a self-described “pissed off black dyke from Georgia” who attended segregated schools in Atlanta during the 1950s.

“This comes from mostly white people — and they don’t have the concept of what racism is from the other side,” she said.

Decatur, Ga. City Commissioner Kecia Cunningham, the first and only openly gay African-American elected official in the Deep South, said the differences between the two movements can be explained with an example:

A white lesbian can walk into a restaurant, and her sexual orientation remains unknown to other patrons. But a black lesbian in that same restaurant can’t escape the color of her skin.

“It’s easier to discriminate against what you see,” Cunningham said.

‘Discrimination…is still discrimination’
Evan Wolfson, founder of New York-based Freedom to Marry and one of the leading voices in the fight for allowing same-sex couples to marry, agreed that there are important differences between the two movements, but said blacks and gays are both striving for dignity.

“Certainly the African-American experience in the United States is unparalleled in its violence, discrimination and indignity, so we shouldn’t make sloppy comparisons, nor can we say that our experience of discrimination is ‘the same,’” Wolfson said. “But that’s really asking the wrong question. No group’s experience with discrimination is the same as the others.

“What matters is the harm discrimination inflicts on the individuals affected, and on the society,” said Wolfson, who addresses the comparison between the two movements in his book, “Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality and Gay People’s Right to Marry.”

To suggest that gays are less entitled to rights and protection because they “choose” their behavior — as opposed to someone’s skin color or gender being “benign” — flies in the face of what this country was founded on, Wolfson argues in his book.

“Americans are as equally protected against discrimination based on race and sex as they are against discrimination based on religion. This is the case even though an individual’s religious belief is, of course, a matter of ‘choice,’” Wolfson wrote.

“Protection of choice and difference — in religion, in opinion, in identity, in expression and in intimate association — is the true moral vision of our American Constitution,” he wrote.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson and Leonard Pitts, two black heterosexual writers, also argue that there are essential similarities between the two movements.

“When any group of ...