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Many of them also make consistent use of civil rights language when speaking about LGBT equality.The endless celebration and mollycoddling of homosexuals in the media has transformed the genteel, camp rightsists of the 1950s into brash, glitter-drenched Pride queens. Irene Monroe constantly challenge homophobia wherever they encounter it, including within African-American culture. Leaders like Pam Spaulding, Melissa Harris-Perry, Rev. Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald pointed out as early as 2004 that "this stinginess about the movement only arises when gays seek to embrace it." The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart has written and spoken extensively on LGBT rights as civil rights, recently tangling with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on the issue. Thankfully this divide, along with the very idea that LGBT rights are unworthy of the term "civil rights," is being increasingly challenged. (I also often wonder if this divide might provide at least a partial explanation for President Obama's apparent reluctance to "evolve" on marriage equality before the 2012 election, lest it cost him any support among a critically important constituent group.) And while some LGBT activists reeling from the 2008 passage of California's Proposition 8 wrongly blamed African Americans, a January 2012 poll revealed a 30-point gap in support of marriage equality between white and black voters in Maryland, illustrating the continued existence of a major racial divide on LGBT issues from coast to coast. Martin Luther King, Jr., compared marriage equality to genocide in 2010. Last year, for example, Truth Wins Out broke the story of a violently anti-gay rant by comedian Tracy Morgan, who claimed during a stand-up routine that he'd stab his son to death if he ever came out as gay. In terms of the resistance to the "LGBT rights are civil rights" concept in the African-American community, I believe much of that can be attributed to the fact that homophobia remains embedded in large swaths of black culture.
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(The bruises hurt just as much, too.) And James Byrd, Jr., murdered because he was black, is every bit as dead as Matthew Shepard, who was killed because he was gay.
Gay rights activists why are you gay meme skin#
Hate crimes are just as evil whether they're driven by the victim's gender expression or their skin color. After all, at the end of the day, you're equally unemployed whether you're fired for being trans or for being an African American. Nobody is well-served when we construct hierarchies of oppression. No single group has earned the exclusive right to use civil rights language. One might say, "How dare you? We've been taken to America against our will, enslaved, whipped, raped, attacked with fire hoses, batons, and dogs, subjected to 'separate but equal' Jim Crow laws and medical experimentation, jailed, and lynched." Another could retort, "Excuse me? We have been persecuted by religions and governments for centuries, imprisoned, castrated, lobotomized, queer-bashed, 'correctively' raped and subjected to other 'separate but equal' laws, forced into damaging 'pray away the gay' therapy, interred in concentration camps, stoned, and hanged." But playing the my-group-has-suffered-more-than-your-group game, what prominent African-American lesbian blogger Pam Spaulding aptly terms the Oppression Olympics, is both futile and tiresome. So while the details may be different, at a fundamental level, the fight for African-American civil rights and LGBT civil rights are both part of the same civil rights movement. And in both cases, the work of achieving legislative, judicial, and cultural equality is ongoing. Both movements arose when a critical mass of courageous people decisively pushed back against bigotry and institutionalized oppression for the first time. Both involve a minority group singled out by the majority for discrimination, unequal treatment, and persecution on the basis of an intrinsic and immutable characteristic. What I am saying - no, declaring - is that the struggle for African-American rights and the struggle for LGBT rights are two fronts in the same battle. I am also not attempting to equate the collective histories of racial and sexual minority groups or the personal experiences of any members of these groups. Make no mistake: I am not suggesting that race, sexual orientation, and gender identity/expression are in any way the same.