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BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Conservative [liberal bias] blacks are objecting to recent comparisons between the gay marriage and civil rights movements, arguing that sexual orientation is a choice.
Links between the two struggles have been made since the state's highest court ruled last week that the Massachusetts constitution guarantees gay couples the right to marry. The court cited landmark laws that struck bans on interracial marriage.
But the Rev. Talbert Swan II said the two struggles are not similar because blacks were lynched, denied property rights and declared inhuman.
"Homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle," he said. "I could not choose the color of my skin. ... For me to ride down the street and get profiled just because of my skin color is something a homosexual will never go through."
A poll released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on November 18, the day of the ruling, indicated 60 percent of blacks opposed gay marriage.
When asked if they favored legal agreements with many of the same rights as marriage, 51 percent of blacks were opposed.
Michael Adams, an attorney with the gay advocacy legal group Lambda Legal, said polls show blacks support gays in other areas, such as workplace equality. Strong conservative religious values that predominate in the black community may explain the division, he said.
He added there are key differences in the two movements, including slavery and forced segregation, which gays never experienced. But the groups have seen similar discrimination based on deeply held prejudices, he said.
Special rights, not equal rights
Mychal Massie, a conservative columnist and member of Project 21, a Washington D.C.-based political alliance of conservative blacks, said the comparisons aren't valid.
"It is an outrage to align something so offensive as this with the struggle of a fallen man, a great man such as Martin Luther King," said Massie, who writes for WorldNetDaily.com.
"The whole thing bespeaks of something much deeper and more insidious than we just want to get married," he said. "They want to change the entire social order."
Alvin Williams, president and CEO of the conservative, Washington D.C.-based Black America's Political Action Committee, said the gay marriage issue looks like an equal rights issue at first, but becomes a "special rights" issue after closer examination because it's about behavior, not ethnicity.
Not everyone objects to the comparison, however. In Wednesday's Democratic presidential debate, black candidates Carol Moseley Braun and the Rev. Al Sharpton declared support for gay marriage. Both compared it to past discrimination against blacks.
The Rev. William Sinkford, a black man who is president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, said the struggle for gay civil rights is this generation's great challenge, just as equality for blacks was the last generation's.
"I think there's very little to be gained by trying to create a hierarchy of oppression," Sinkford said.
Emory College professor David Garrow said the legal histories of the two movements have abundant parallels, including the arguments that marriage between the races and same sexes is unnatural and against God's law. Homosexuals have also seen similar bias in the workplace when they've made their sexual orientation known, he said.
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