Gay Marriage Protesters Strain Concept of Equality

Same-sex marriage protests were held nationwide yesterday.

This picture showing demonstrators in Los Angeles illustrates the intellectual bankruptcy of the movement. There simply isn't much analytical substance to the claim that gays are forced to sit at the "back of the bus," which is the attempt by the gay rights movement to capture the moral legitimacy of America's historic black freedom struggle from themselves.

It's a pitiful effort, however, since gays enjoy full civil rights under the law today, and even black Americans see the homosexual push to coopt the African American legacy as an affront (as we saw with the 70 percent of black Californians voting Yes on 8).

Jeff Jacoby has more:

The civil rights once denied to black Americans included the right to register as a voter, the right to cast a ballot, the right to use numerous public facilities, the right to get a fair hearing in court, the right to send their children to an integrated public school, and the right to equal opportunity in housing and employment. Have gay people been denied any of these rights? Have they been forced to sit in the back of buses? Confined to segregated neighborhoods? Barred from serving on juries? Subjected to systematic economic exploitation?

Plainly, declining to change the timeless definition of marriage deprives no one of "the civil rights once denied" to blacks, and it is an absurdity to claim otherwise. It is also a poisonous slur: For if opposing same-sex marriage is like opposing civil rights, then voters who backed Proposition 8 are no better than racists, the moral equivalent of those who turned the fire hoses on blacks in Birmingham in 1963 ....

If black voters overwhelmingly reject the claim that marriage amendments like Proposition 8 are nothing more than bigotry-fueled assaults on civil rights, perhaps it is because they know only too well what real bigotry looks like. Perhaps it is because they resent the assertion that adhering to the ageless meaning of marriage is tantamount to supporting the pervasive humiliation and cruelty of Jim Crow. Perhaps it is because they are not impressed by strident condemnations of "intolerance" and "hate" by people who traffic in rank anti-Mormon hatemongering.

Or perhaps it is because they understand that a fundamental gulf separates the civil rights movement from the demand for same-sex marriage. One was a fight for genuine equality, for the right of black Americans to live on the same terms, and under the same restrictions, as whites. The other is a demand to change the terms on which marriage has always been available by giving it a meaning it has never before had. That isn't civil rights - and playing the race card doesn't change that fact.

What we will continue to see, frankly, is more of the in-your-face authoritarianism that's been the norm so far.

What's somewhat depressing, of course, is that we've seen few political leaders in California speak out in defense of the majority's vote on November 4.

Since when did it become shameful to live in a system that governs on the basis of majority rule?

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times