In the recent thread about bakers in Colorado, the very first reply mentioned Rosa Parks, thus joining a trend of bringing up comparisons to the Civil Rights movement for everything from voter ID laws to Food Stamps. This board and others have long rejected frivolous comparisons of minor issues to Hitler and the Nazis. Such comparisons to the Civil Rights period should be rejected as well. They’re insulting to the memory of those who struggled and died for the cause of desegregation, and insulting to the intelligence of everyone.
Government in the deep South was directly responsible for countless thousands of violent crimes, sometimes by having the police attack groups of Blacks, sometimes by having police and the Klan and other groups working together, and sometimes by allowing the Klan to do its thing with implicit promise that the government wouldn’t intervene or punish the guilty. They were responsible for numerous bombings and burnings of Black homes, churches, and businesses; attacking civil rights marches with dogs and hoses and the like; and other violent atrocities too many to name. To toss off mindless comparisons with current situations not involving mass violence is insulting.
Gays also face discrimination, harassment and, yes, violent crimes. Gay rights happen to be Civil Rights, too.
It’s not a 1:1 comparison but the parallels are much, MUCH closer than when one, say, equates Obamacare with Marxism or attempts at gun legislation with Hitler’s Hitlerdom of Hitlering Hitlers.
I think there are two issues here, one that reasonable can disagree on and one that they cannot:
Government sanctioned/forced discrimination or segregation. That’s something that should not happen, and there is no “reasonable” argument for it.
Discrimination in the private market. While few of us would want to see it happen, I think reasonable people can disagree on whether it should be illegal or not.
Right there are no comparisons, gays have never been the victims of violent atrocities nor have they ever suffered from discrimination by the government and it’s enforcers…
It was not in the US, but in the UK don’t forget Alan Turing.
Some civil rights demonstrations involved sit ins at private lunch counters. Greensboro, NC for example.
Of course the comparisons can go too far. When I was in high school my chemistry class, pissed off at our teacher, walked out, sat in the hallway, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” We were pretty much all white, middle class and Jewish (and in an honors class) so our appeal to the civil rights movement was pushing it to say the least.
You are saying comparing gay rights to civil rights is ‘overused, incorrect, and insulting’ and ‘To toss off mindless comparisons with current situations not involving mass violence is insulting.’
Those are some examples of mass violence against gays.
Seeing how gays have face and continue to face many of the same issues as African Americans in the country I fail to see how they are not comparable even by your distorted definition of civil rights.
The people complaining about this comparison I’m aware of are anti gay rights. Are there others?
You left out the other part of the sentence in your quote. Do I take that to mean that if Southerners refrained from violence and only discriminated through law and refusal of service it would all have been okay? Violent discrimination was rare - nonviolent discrimination happened every day.
So, by your definition, something is only a violation of civil rights if it involves “mass violence”? And a call for civil rights is only valid if it is specifically protesting against “mass violence”?
But since the Civil Rights act does make the latter form of discrimination illegal, at least when it is race-based, any proposal to do something similar for some other group does fairly invite comparison with the CRA, ITR.
I’m no fan of the drug war but what you just did is even stupider than comparing Castro to Hitler.
Perhaps you genuinely do believe that Barack Obama is as bad as Theodore Bilbo(if you don’t then you really didn’t understand the implications of what you were saying) but I’d strongly recommend against making such a statement in Harlem, Watts, or Roxbury.
Cite #1 references the bombing of a lesbian bar that was committed by Eric Robert Rudolph. He did cite anti-gay activism as one part of his motivation for the string of bombings of which he was convicted. He was pled guilty and was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences for his crimes. Government did not look the other way.
Cite #2 references a bombing in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999. The article cited notes that, at the time, South Africa had the “the world’s most liberal constitution with respect to sexual orientation and it’s about to enact legislation which will allow for asylum of this nature.” This again does not seem to be a matter of government sponsored or endorsed violence. As far as I can tell this bombing remains unsolved, though there were many bombings around Cape Town over a period of time in 1999-2000 and other did not seem to target gays.
Cite #3 references the killing of Michael Shepherd. A tragedy, for sure. But not an act of mass violence at all. Whether the attack had anything to do with his sexuality has recently been brought into doubt in a book by Stephen Jimenez .
Cite #4 references a murder of one gay man in New York City. It references other crimes of violence against gay couples in the area. That the accused was promptly arrested and a vigorous investigation has led to charges would seem to argue that government is in no way downplaying this Greenwich Village slaying.
Cite #5 references Stonewall from 1969, the only item that seems to relate to government sponsored or condoned violence against gays.
Of those cites you mention one act of mass, government sponsored violence against gays which occurred more than 40 years ago out of those 5 cites. That is not to say that anti-gay bigotry is a solved problem.
My point is not that there is no violence against gays. There is. There is undoubtedly some that is committed under the color of law. But I just don’t believe it is of the scale and scope as the racist inspired violence in the Civil Rights era in the 1950s-60s.
Most black people didn’t have dogs sicced on them. There was the realistic threat of violence, to be sure. But on a day-to-day basis, it was social and economic humiliations that were on the forefront on their minds.
We don’t have any images of white women being pushed down the street with firehouse. I don’t think there were very many suffragettes who got the shit beaten out of them or who were assassinated. And yet it’s undeniable women were discriminated against and oppressed.
That’s kinda it right there. Hard to argue with, unless you think being gay is a “lifestyle choice”. I don’t think we have too many people around here who think that. And even then, there’s a strong argument to be made that: so what? So what if people choose to be gay? As long as they’re not hurting anyone else, they should be free to do so.
Homosexuals being rounded up into death camps in Nazi Germany isn’t enough to qualify? Or for something modern, how about the attempt backed by American evangelicals to have homosexuality in Uganda made a capital crime?
The most important difference when it comes to civil rights between blacks and homosexuals is that it’s much easier for homosexuals to “pass”.
So? South Africa is also known as a hotbed of the “corrective rape” of lesbians.