Black Leaders Support Equality For Gays and Lesbians

While there is a lot of homophbia and anti-gay bigotry in the black community (and even more in the white community!), civil rights leaders are unanimous in their support of EQUAL CIVIL RIGHTS for gays and lesbians:

Julian Bond, Civil Rights Leader
"I see this as a civil rights issue.
That means I support gay civil marriage."
(News Release, NBJC, 2/2/04)

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA, Civil Rights Hero)
"It is time to say forthrightly that the government's exclusion of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters from civil marriage officially degrades them and their families. It denies them the basic human right to marry the person they love. It denies them numerous legal protections for their families. This discrimination is wrong...I've heard the reasons for opposing civil marriage for same-sex couples. Cut through the distractions, and they stink of the same fear, hatred, and intolerance I have known in racism and in bigotry." (Boston Globe, 11/25/03)

Rev. Joseh Lowery, Civil Rights Leader
"When you talk about the law discriminating, the law granting a privilege here, and a denying it there, that's a civil rights issue. And I can't take it away from anybody." (ABC News, 3/13/04)

Carol Moseley Braun
"I believe this is a civil rights issue...It seems to me that if people want to marry a person of a different race that's no diffferent than somebody wanting to marry someone of the same sex." (Democratic Debates, Des Moines 11/24/03)

Rev. Peter Gomes, Havard University Chaplain
"To extend the civil right of marrriage to homosexuals will neither solve nor complicate the problems already inherent in marriage, but what it will do is permit a whole class of persons, our fellow citizens under the law heretofore irrationally deprived of a civil right, both to benefit from and participate in a valuable, yet vulnerable institution which in our changing society needs all the help it can get." (Boston Globe, 2/4/04)

Coretta Scott King, Civil Rights Leader
"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the civil rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother-and sisterhod for lesbian and gay people." (Reuters, 3/3/98)

National Black Justice Coalition