Mike Huckabee on The View, offers his reasons why gays haven't crossed "the civil rights threshold."
HUCKABEE: It's a different set of rights. People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that's not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we're talking about a redefinition of an institution, that's different than individual civil rights.
BEHAR: Well, segregation was an institution, too, in a way. It was right there on the books.
HUCKABEE: But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.
Huckabee is taking advantage of a comparative overreach by people who explicitly compare the gay rights movement to the civil rights movement when the comparison isn't appropriate. Gays have actually been the been the targets of some very high profile violent attacks, (Ali Frick points to Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard and Lawrence King, but there are many more) but the nature and historical contexts of each movement are very different. They are discrete experiences of oppression, and so should be discussed, when possible, without the crutch of an inappropriate comparison. The fight for LGBTQ rights is in and of itself just even without a historical link to the fight for black rights.
Nor does it really matter. Huckabee did not have to get hosed down or his skull cracked to have the right to marry his wife, and instituting some arbitrary threshold of violence that non-heterosexuals have to meet before they can claim the same rights as all other citizens is fundamentally un-American.
But Huckabee is a shrewd fellow who is well versed in the civil rights movement, and seems to have a rapport with black folks most Republicans lack. It's no secret that some Republicans believe their opportunity to drive a wedge in the progressive coalition lies within the conservative religious beliefs of minorities. So his aim here is to make the argument not about whether the denial of marriage rights to gays are unjust, but whether gays have really suffered as much as black folks in the pursuit of their rights. It is an attempt to start a whole new kind of culture war between blacks and gays over the authenticity of suffering in the aftermath of tensions over Prop 8.
The problem with Huckabee's reasoning is that no one should have to suffer in claiming the rights that should be afforded to them as American citizens. Huckabee recognizes the nobility of black folks who fought to be recognized as human beings and full citizens without acknowledging the underlying fact that the hypocrisy of American bigotry made that fight necessary. And it still does. There's no need for a scorecard of assaults to make the case for gay rights, gay people have earned their rights simply by virtue of being American citizens. It shouldn't take the vile intolerance of a Bull Connor to make that obvious.
--A. Serwer
