Are Gay Rights Civil Rights?

A T L A N T A, March 13 -- In Boston, Bishop Gilbert Thompson does not like it one bit. "I resent the fact," he says, "that homosexuals are trying to piggy back on the civil rights struggles of the '60s."

In Los Angeles, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson says it's "offensive" and that the civil rights movement "is not about sex."

In Chicago, Detroit, and Raleigh, N.C., the black ministers are beginning to preach on an uncomfortable subject in African-American circles. Gay marriage, they argue, has no place in a movement defined by Jim Crow laws and the right to vote.

"I was born black," said Thompson. "I was born male. Homosexuals are not born, they're made. They don't qualify."

It is a question of legitimacy. Civil rights protection, many argue, is meant for people, not behavior. Pastor Garland Hunt of Atlanta says that generally means race, gender and disability only. "It doesn't protect behavior patterns."

For many African Americans, who began the civil rights movement in the black churches of the conservative South, gay and lesbian Americans are people of poor behavior.

"Same-sex marriage has nothing to do with civil rights, this is an issue of morality," said Hunt.

Demonstrations Look Familiar

But outside courthouses in San Francisco, Boston and Atlanta, the demonstrations look familiar.

At one protest, outside the Georgia state capital, it took half a dozen police officers to forcibly remove a young woman who decided to lie in the middle of a busy roadway. Across the street, a crowd of mostly gay and lesbian 20-somethings that supported her sang "We Shall Overcome."

The Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative gay group, usually at odds with a majority of gay and lesbians, has also joined the debate.

In a new television campaign aimed at the hearts and minds of average Americans, the group uses civil rights imagery to make its point. The powerful images of white-only public facilities invoke the righteousness of the civil rights struggle.