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06/14/2007

What could a civil rights pioneer possibly know about civil rights?

by Jeremy Hooper

 Uploads Staff Andrea Lafferty2424-1Lashing out against Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) for equating of gay marriage bans with those that once prevented interracial nuptials, the Traditional Values Coalition's Andrew Lafferty today says this:

Rep. Lewis is a member of the Old Guard of civil rights activists who have sold out to the homosexual movement,” ...“The New Guard of African American civil rights leaders and church leaders are much more likely to support a biblical stand against homosexual behaviors. The division between the Old Guard and the New Guard is similar to the old mainline churches versus the new evangelical, charismatic or non-denominational churches.

The homosexual hijacking of the civil rights movement is an insult to every person who fought against racism and segregation during the 1960s,” ...“Homosexuals have no shame when it comes to exploiting every noble social movement in our culture. These radical groups routinely come up with a new ‘holiday’ or special week in order to push their agenda upon the rest of us—and if you protest against this callous exploitation of important historical events, you’re labeled a homophobic bigot.

Okay, so let's just consider a few things. Here's a short description of John Lewis from his Wikipedia page:

John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and was an important leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation.
...
Born in Troy, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, Lewis was educated at the American Baptist Theological Seminary and at Fisk University, both in Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the local sit-in movement. He participated in the Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a national leader in the struggle for civil rights. Lewis became nationally known after his prominent role on the Selma to Montgomery marches, when police beat the nonviolently marching Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today.

Of John Lewis, the historian Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream, (speech) was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence."

"John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a 'cooling-off period,' a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

"The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events—some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled."

Call us nutty, but somehow we think Rep. Lewis has FAR more authority to speak to the notion of African-American civil rights than a white, affluent, evangelical Christian from California. But then again, what do we know? We are merely radical homosexuals who believe that the fight for basic human decency did not begin and end with one wronged community!!

Oh, and Andrea: As for our recognition of events such as the historic Loving v. Virginia decision -- Did it ever occur to you that we celebrate these milestones because they are exemplary of the way we would like to see history progress? That we celebrate these events because they are positive bits of progression? That we relate them to our own situation because the parallels are real and apparent? That we focus on them because we think that events like the striking down of anti-miscegenation laws are occasions truly worthy of historical celebration? And did you ever stop and think that maybe we really do care because we have a f***ing heart that's crying out for peace, love, and acceptance?

No, of course you didn't! Such reasoned consideration would make us gays look far too much like humans, not enough like demons.

Homosexuals Try To Hijack Civil Rights Movement [TVC]

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Your thoughts

"...the new evangelical, charismatic or non-denominational churches."

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I think Andrew means the new political action committees disguised as "churches" formed as little more than organizations to raise money and establish theocracy.

We used to call them cults.

Posted by: Kevin | Jun 14, 2007 11:32:30 PM

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