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City Action Coalition, on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005, Presented Rev. Eugene Rivers as the featured speaker for their leadership forum on the topic "Is Same-Sex Marriage a Civil Right?" Rev. Rivers' Address was titled "On Hijacking the Civil Rights Legacy" |
----- ------- Original Message ------- -----
From: "City Action Coalition" <info@cityactioncoalition.com>
To: "'Stephen Parelli'" <stephen_parelli@othersheep.org>
Sent: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:42:35
Steve,
Here is Rev. Rivers address in text form:
On Hijacking the Civil Rights Legacy
There is a specter haunting America. That specter is the movement to
promote homosexual marriage. The movement has adopted a cunning
political strategy to appeal to everyone from the suburban soccer mom to the
urban white maleliberal: It has packaged its demand for a radical re-definition of
marriage in the rhetoric and images of the Civil Rights Movement. This strategy,
though utterly cynical and possibly racist, has enormous strategic utility.
For what reasonable, fair-minded American could object to a movement that
conjures up images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and pacifistic marchers facing
down dogs and hoses? In the aftermath of the struggle for racial justice,
who is prepared to risk being labeled a bigot for opposing the homosexual
activist agenda?
As an exercise in marketing and merchandising, this strategy is the most
brilliant playing of the race card in recent memory. Not since the "poverty
pimps," of thirty-five years ago, who leveraged the guilt and sense of fair
play of the American public to hustle affirmative action set-asides, have we
witnessed so brazen a misuse of African American history for partisan
purposes.
But the partisans of homosexual marriage have a problem. There is no
evidence in the historiographical literature of the Civil Rights Movement
and its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support their political
and moral argument of equivalence. As the eminent historian Eugene D.
Genovese observed over thirty years ago, the Black American experience as a
function of slavery is unique and without analogue in the history of the
United States. While other ethnic and social groups have experienced
discrimination and hardship, none of their experiences historically and
politically could compare with the physical and cultural brutality of
slavery. It was in the crucible of the unique experience of slavery that the
Civil Rights Movement was born.
The Civil Rights Movement was born with the establishment of the United
States as a slaveholding republic. This extraordinary history included the
kidnapping and brutal transport of Blacks from African shores, and the
stripping of their language, identity, and culture in order to subjugate and
exploit them. It also included the constitutional enshrining of these evils
in the form of a Supreme Court decision-Dred Scott v. Sandford-denying to
blacks any rights that whites must respect, and the establishment of Jim
Crow and de jure racial discrimination after Dred Scott was overturned by a
civil war and three historic constitutional amendments.
It is these basic facts that weaken the efforts of apologists for homosexual
marriage to exploit the rhetoric of civil rights to advance the interests of
a generally privileged group.
In fact, the campaign for homosexual marriage is, ironically, an assertion
of white skin privilege. Frequently, same-sex couples wanting to "marry" are
white lesbians who seek the accoutrements of family life, with kids and the
proverbial white picket fence, without the benefit of a father for the
children. From their positions of socioeconomic privilege, they insist that
their desires must be viewed as rights instead of preferences. The
dominantdemographic behind this political initiative is neither homosexual males
nor people of color, notwithstanding the occasional interracial lesbian couple
who are projected for propaganda purposes.
It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups'
desires and preferences as rights that has eviscerated the moral authority
of the paleo-liberal civil rights industry. Let us consider the question of
rights. What makes a homosexual's aspiration to overturn thousands of years
of universally recognized morality and practice a "right"? Why should an
institution designed for the reproduction of civil society and the rearing
of children in a moral environment in which their interests are given pride
of place be refashioned to accommodate relationships integrated around
intrinsically non-marital sexual conduct?
One must, in the current discussion, address directly the assertion of
discrimination. The claim that the definition of marriage as the union of
one man and one woman constitutes discrimination is based on a,false analogy
with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through
much of the 20th century. This alleged analogy collapses when one considers
that skin pigmentation is utterly irrelevant to the procreative and unitive
functions of marriage. Racial differences do not affect or interfere with
the ability of sexually complementary spouses to become "one-flesh," as the
Book of Genesis puts it, by sexual intercourse that fulfills the behavioral
conditions of procreation. As the law of marital consummation makes clear,
it is this bodily union that serves as the foundation of the profound
sharing of life at every level-biological, emotional, dispositional,
rational, and spiritual-that marriage is. This explains not only why
marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but also why marriages
cannot be between more than two people (despite the desire of polyamorists
to have their sexual preferences and practices legally recognized and
blessed).
Moreover, the analogy between the requirement of sexual complementarity and
the prohibitions of interracial marriages disregards the fact that the whole
point of those prohibitions was to maintain and advance a system of racial
subordination and exploitation. It was to maintain a caste system in which
one race was relegated to conditions of social and economic inferiority.
The definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not
establish a sexual caste system or relegate one sex to conditions of social
and economic inferiority. It does, to be sure, exclude the recognition as
lawful "marriages" of some forms of sexual combining-including polygyny,
polyandry, polyamory, and same-sex relationships. But there is nothing
invidious or discriminatory about laws that decline to treat all sexual
wants or proclivities as morally equal. People are equal in worth and
dignity, but sexual choices and lifestyles are not. That is why the law's
refusal to license polygamous, polyamorous, and homosexual unions is
entirely right and proper. In recognizing, favoring, and promoting true
marriage, the law does not violate the "rights" of people whose "lifestyle
preferences" are denied the stamp of legal approval. Rather, it furthers
and fosters the common good of civil society, and makes proper provision for
the physical and moral protection and nurturing of children.
Well-intentioned moderates and liberals shudder upon hearing the very word
"discrimination." Its simple enunciation instills guilt and dulls their
critical faculties. The word has now been emptied of its normative and
historical content, thereby once again serving to disadvantage Blacks in
American society. Malcontented members of any group-however privileged-can
simply invoke the term and launch their own personalized civil rights
industry. It is the recrudescence of a culture of narcissism.
Defending the Civil Rights legacy should prove cold comfort to its historic
advocates, because the loss of its distinctive nature is our own fault. It
was our failure, philosophically and politically, to develop a compelling
historiography of the movement that contributed to its decline and decay.
>From the teaching in schools, to the use of the term in the public square,
the notion of civil rights has been diluted, ahistoricized, and nearly
emptied of content in relation to the lived historical experience of Blacks
in this country. That the authorized institutional inheritors of the Civil
Rights Movement failed to recognize and prevent this loss brings into
question their ability to continue as effective leaders of Black people.
It is especially sad and disturbing that the established leadership of the
Civil Rights industry has utterly failed to resist the corruption and
co-optation by a predominantly white special interest group of the history
of the Civil Rights phase of the Black freedom struggle. This failure
highlights the need for a regime change in favor of new leadership and a
post-Civil Rights conceptual framework for addressing a more complex racial
reality. Moreover, in light of the phenomenon of judicially mandated
homosexual marriage, we believe that Black leaders need to speak forcefully
in favor of President George W. Bush's proposal for a Federal Marriage
Amendment. If their support for true marriage alienates them from their white
liberal friends, so be it. No community has suffered more than has
ours from the weakening of the institution of marriage at the hands of
purveyors of the doctrines of the sexual revolution. It is our sons and our
daughters who have paid the bulk of the costs imposed by a cultural elite
which seeks to overthrow cultural and Biblical principles of sexual
restraint and responsibility. Leaders of our community should therefore be
in the vanguard of the movement to prevent further moral erosion and begin
reversing historical declines.
We respectfully suggest that Martin Luther King, Jr. did not give his life,
nor Fannie Lou Hamer struggle, so that libertines could be free to pursue
their polymorphous forms of sexuality under the banner of the Black Civil
Rights Movement.
Eugene F. Rivers 3d is Founder and President of the Seymour Institute for
Advanced Christian Studies (www.siacs.org)
Kenneth D. Johnson is Senior Fellow for Social Policy and Civil Society at
the Seymour Institute for Advanced Christian Studies
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Rev. Eugene Rivers, second
from the right, with City Action
Coalition board members
from the right, with City Action
Coalition board members
Go to the report on Rev. Eugene's address |
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