Gay Rights are Not Civil Rights

[Koga No Goshi]

First lets forget the fact that gays arent nearly subject to 1/100000000 of the prejudice that blacks were.

I will give this topic more attention later Strike (to anyone who might have wondered I am buried at work at the moment) but I just had to throw out... this little comment was a big loser, Strike. When black people talk about the discrimination they experience, the same basic crowd who would respond with an attitude like "oh well how long has it been since slavery... name something serious in your lifetime, please" then turn around and say gay equality issues are a joke because they aren't 1/1000000000 as serious as the ones against blacks.

So, you can't win.

We are, thankfully, heading out of the era where every single black person has a story about a family member lynched, or shot by police, or losing or being refused a job they were qualified for, just because of prejudice. However, it is quite safe to say that a majority, if not all, of the presently living gay people in the U.S. have faced physical violence, the real and direct threat of such, the loss of a job, or had to conceal their sexuality in order to get, or keep, a job. So saying that gay people didn't come over on a slave ship is rather glib when a more realistic comparison would be, for example, the situation of many blacks in the 1960s where their equal legal rights either didn't fully exist or were widely unrecognized, and the situation of many gay people today where things like "Don't ask, don't tell" are still the law of the land, and discrimination against them is still, in many regards, absolutely legal and upheld. I honestly don't know why you or anyone else, especially someone who is not homophobic and not antagonistic to the concept of gay rights or equality, would feel the need to vehemently iterate that the legal and social problems facing gay people are in every way totally unanalagous to some of the history of civil rights for racial minorities. It comes off like a very desperate effort to insist that what discrimination does exist against gay people, is okay, because it "obviously isn't as bad" as what happened to blacks 150 or 300 years ago.