TheLoop21.com

By: Devona Walker (Add to your loop)
Wed, 04/08/2009 - 11:23

Gay rights do have similarities to the Civil Rights Movement.

Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the “I Have A Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, as part of the March on Washington, in the shadow of the Lincoln Monument. Within five years, he was dead, assassinated while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., April 4, 1968. He was only 39.

Matthew Shepard was a University of Wyoming college student. On Oct. 6, 1998, he was beaten and tortured. On Oct. 12, he died from the injuries he sustained in that attack. Shepard was gay. 

On June 7, during that same year, James Byrd, was stripped naked, beaten, chained to the back of a pickup truck by his ankles and dragged for three miles. His head was severed from his body when it hit a culvert. Byrd was black. 

All of these men were killed by hate. Denying someone life is the most basic violation of civil rights. And gay folks, just like ethnic minorities, have been fighting this struggle for the majority of their lives.

It’s been 41 years and four days since King was assassinated. A few days ago, the Vermont Legislature overwhelmingly gave full marital rights to gay couples. They had to overturn the veto of their Republican governor to get it done. But they got it done. On the  same day, the District of Columbia voted to recognize out-of-state gay marriages.

Just last week, a judicial panel in Iowa found denying gays the right to marry to be unconstitutional. On the horizon, gay advocates are pushing for similar legislation in New Hampshire. There a proposal recently passed in the House and is on its way for a vote in the Senate. 

New Jersey and New York, too, are expected to take up the issue of gay marriage. Advocates there are optimistic.

Have we finally reached a tipping point on the issue of gay marriage? Are we, as a country, ridding ourselves of the final peg of government-sanctioned discrimination?

“It’s starting to look that way,” said Chris Edelson, state legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization. Edelson says it reminds him of Pong, a rudimentary video game from the late '80s. It was hard-going at first, but now it appears as if the movement to legalize gay marriage has crossed some threshold and is now bopping all over the political screen.

“When legislators in other states see this is happening, they start to think, oh we are falling behind. We have to do something. We are following Iowa,” he said, adding that winning gay marriage in the America’s heartland was particularly encouraging. 

Edelson knows the momentum is building, just as it built decades ago with the Civil Rights Movement.

He also knows there is still this ideological divide between the gay movement and the Civil Rights Movement and between the gay and black communities. It was easily exploited in California, shortly after the passage of Proposition 8 — high profile defeat of gay marriage. 

Back in November in California, white voters voted against the gay marriage ban by a very slim margin of 51- 49 percent.