It wasn’t so much the one-liner columnist Lenard Pitts Jr. borrowed from MLK to make his point regarding Marion Barry’s decision to vote against DC’s decision to recognize same-sex marriage that irritated me…much. The following quote is what pushed it over the edge for me.
One wonders how differently that movement might have turned out had white people such as Clifford Durr, Viola Liuzzo, Ralph McGill, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and Lyndon Johnson allowed themselves to be cowed by the angry voices of white men and women saying, ”All hell is going to break loose.” For that matter, how much longer might the long night of slavery have lasted had white people like Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott and Thaddeus Stevens bowed to the fact that the white community was ”just adamant” against freedom.
One wonders, too, whether those black ministers in the hall see their mirror image in generations of white ministers who have used the Bible to condone the evil of slavery (”Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.”) and the fiction of African-American inferiority (the ”curse” of Ham).
Sadly, Pitts is following the path of numbers of our civil rights soldiers who are so desperate to lead another movement, comparing the gay marriage issue to the days of Jim Crow and Black slavery is fair game.
If Pitts believe that gays should have the right to marry, then he should make the case without pimping out his own history. The collective rights of the gay community are in no way being held up on this marriage issue. No separate water fountains, no lynchings, no unspoken rule telling them that when addressing a heterosexual, you must always look down, no rules telling them that they must enter through the back of the restaurant if they want to order food–NO COMPARISON!
Second, unlike Blacks who were systematically held down economically in this country, the gay population has done quite well.
GLBT: 2% of the population = $690 billion (2007)
African-Americans: 13% of the population = $845 billion (2007) More…
Thirdly, what constitues as “marriage” in the gay community and do they really want it? Consider these random quotes from just a few prominent homosexuals.
“I’d be for marriage if I thought gay people would challenge and change the institution and not buy into the traditional meaning of till death do us part and monogram forever.” (Mitchel Raphael, editor of Fab, A gay magazine based in Toronto, Canada)
“The thought of a priest pronouncing the couple in front of me husband and husband makes me feel icky…I’ve been to a couple of parties celebrating gay love that were sweet and jolly in equal measure. But neither dressed up the occasion as marriage. Both seemed implicitly to understand that a gay partnership might be equal to a straight one but that doesn’t necessarily make it the same…Marriage is about men and women.“ (Paul Flynn, a homosexual writing in The Guardian)
Or perhaps Pitts should read Johann Hari’s opinion where he feels that Prop. 8 isn’t the biggest threat to the homosexual community.
Pitts would do better to consider all the voices on this issue instead of hastily placing his own history on the auction block.
Pimp My Martin: The series still continues…
by Duane on May 12th, 2009 at 12:28 pmSadly, Pitts is following the path of numbers of our civil rights soldiers who are so desperate to lead another movement, comparing the gay marriage issue to the days of Jim Crow and Black slavery is fair game.
If Pitts believe that gays should have the right to marry, then he should make the case without pimping out his own history. The collective rights of the gay community are in no way being held up on this marriage issue. No separate water fountains, no lynchings, no unspoken rule telling them that when addressing a heterosexual, you must always look down, no rules telling them that they must enter through the back of the restaurant if they want to order food–NO COMPARISON!
Second, unlike Blacks who were systematically held down economically in this country, the gay population has done quite well.
GLBT: 2% of the population = $690 billion (2007)
African-Americans: 13% of the population = $845 billion (2007) More…
Thirdly, what constitues as “marriage” in the gay community and do they really want it? Consider these random quotes from just a few prominent homosexuals.
“I’d be for marriage if I thought gay people would challenge and change the institution and not buy into the traditional meaning of till death do us part and monogram forever.” (Mitchel Raphael, editor of Fab, A gay magazine based in Toronto, Canada)
“The thought of a priest pronouncing the couple in front of me husband and husband makes me feel icky…I’ve been to a couple of parties celebrating gay love that were sweet and jolly in equal measure. But neither dressed up the occasion as marriage. Both seemed implicitly to understand that a gay partnership might be equal to a straight one but that doesn’t necessarily make it the same…Marriage is about men and women.“ (Paul Flynn, a homosexual writing in The Guardian)
Or perhaps Pitts should read Johann Hari’s opinion where he feels that Prop. 8 isn’t the biggest threat to the homosexual community.
Pitts would do better to consider all the voices on this issue instead of hastily placing his own history on the auction block.