IFI Press Release: King’s Legacy and Civil Rights Cause Misrepresented

“Civil Unions” Bill Not Analogous to Civil Rights Movement

For years, homosexual activists and their allies have manufactured and exploited an absurd and offensive analogy between homosexuality and race in order to advance their moral and political agenda. Homosexualists use the heroic battle to end racial discrimination as a Trojan Horse to eradicate moral judgments about homosexual conduct. All civilized persons — particularly African-Americans — should be outraged. Regarding this analogy, homosexualists have no ethical commitments to either logic or evidence, and they have no regard for the black family in America that already experiences tremendous struggles.

Homosexualist organizations have one goal that reigns supreme over all others: the eradication of the true moral belief that homosexual acts are profoundly immoral. And they are willing to exploit the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement in order to achieve their morally dubious and intellectually vacuous goal.

Illinois State Senator Heather Steans (D-Chicago) cited Dr. Martin Luther King’s description of “the long arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice,” saying that jettisoning the most enduring criterion of marriage -sexual complementarity- is the moral equivalent of “ending Jim Crow segregation laws.”

State Senator Michael Noland (D-Elgin) continued by saying dishonestly that “We have come far on this issue of Civil Rights and today good men and woman on both sides of the aisle should be able to unite behind this very straightforward issue.” This is dishonest in that the legalization of civil unions for homosexuals is anything but a “straight forward issue.”

Both State Representative Careen Gordon (D-Morris) and openly homosexual State Representative Greg Harris (D-Chicago) further exploited the flawed analogy by comparing same sex marriage to interracial marriage. They are in essence saying that opposition to discrimination based on an immutable, non-behavioral, morally neutral condition like race is equivalent to homosexuals’ fight to normalize and institutionalize deviant sexual relations. Rep. Gordon expressed a radical and heretical notion in her plea for civil unions, which is merely a more publicly palatable term for same sex marriages. She described the passage of the civil union bill as doing “God’s work.”

If our elected leaders truly hold as ignorant an understanding of the nature of homosexuality as evidenced in these statements, then they don’t deserve their positions. These statements reveal the utterly foolish, erroneous, and offensive idea that homosexuality is equivalent in nature to race. There is no evidence or justification to warrant such an analogy.

Race or skin color is 100 percent heritable, absolutely immutable and carries no behavioral implications whatsoever. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is defined by desire and voluntary sexual acts that are open to moral assessment. There is no research proving that homosexuality is immutable or biologically determined. In addition, homosexuality carries inherent behavioral implications that all societies throughout history have deemed immoral.

Homosexual activists and their allies are advancing their subversive moral and political goals by hijacking the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. They seek to intimidate philosophical conservatives into silence by associating them with racism and bigotry. Volitional homosexual acts are not equivalent to race. And morals beliefs regarding volitional homosexual conduct are not equivalent to racism.

Philosophical conservatives and all people who are committed to rational argument need to openly, courageously, and persistently challenge the flawed analogy that suggests that homosexuality is equivalent to race, for this is the assumption upon which the entire homosexual-normalization house of cards is built.

We should not allow the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be exploited for the destructive purposes of the movement to normalize homosexuality and demonize traditional moral beliefs.