Viewpoint: Civil Rights and Gay Rights
What's at stake for blacks in the Massachusetts gay marriage debate
By JENINNE LEE-ST. JOHN

...So yes, in the game of Who's Been More Systematically Oppressed?, black people win hands down. But that doesn't discount the hardships of other groups. (Remember the federal Defense of Marriage Act?) And it doesn't mean everyone isn't entitled to equal rights. Through the years, America has dished out enough oppression to go around. Much of it has been strikingly similar. The anti-miscegenation laws that were enacted in much of the South were rooted in interpretations of the Bible. Interracial intimacy was seen as unnatural. Blacks were put forth as filthy sub-humans who wanted to muddy white bloodlines and thus destroy the goodness of the white race. Race mixing was akin to bestiality. Sound familiar? "Defenders" of marriage, from Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to Justice Antonin Scalia to Pope Benedict, have tossed out arguments just like these in their quest to keep same-sex couples from the altar.

...The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is expected to decide within four months whether to grant marriage licenses to out-of-state gay and lesbian couples, to grant them the same rights enjoyed by in-state homosexual couples since 2003. I'm hoping the Court rules in favor of the eight same-sex couples, from the other five New England states plus New York, that want to certify their commitment to each other. Then the Court would be sticking to the principle that guided its original decision that cleared the way for gay marriage in the first place, the same tenet that led the U.S. Supreme Court to unanimously decriminalize interracial unions forty years ago: the notion that marriage is "one of the basic civil rights." A law that blatantly denies that right and one that essentially affirms such laws elsewhere, are equally unjust.

Black Americans don't need to approve of or understand homosexuality to recognize that. And they owe it to successes of the civil rights movement, to their own triumph over inhumane treatment and accusations of an impure agenda, to try. My mother's father was a religious man too, but I believe he would have.