Rep. John Lewis says, "Today I think more than ever before, we have to speak up and speak out to end discrimination based on sexual orientation"

"It’s not the business of the federal government, it’s not the business of the state government, to tell two individuals that they cannot fall in love and get married."

-- Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air

by Ken

I confess. I played hooky from work today to watch the inauguration.

Okay, it was "grownup" hooky. I used a personal day. But you have to understand how ferociously protective I tend to be of my modest cache of PTO days in January. Every year I assume I need to hoard them for either some on-the-horizon personal crisis or -- really reaching -- the possibility of actually doing something for pleasure. Then off course every December I'm left with using up those carefully hoarded days. But in January that one-two punch of dread and hope is normally all-powerful.

With all my reservations about the (no longer incoming) administration, I'm glad I watched. I suspect I'm not alone in having gotten the most pleasure out of the rousing benediction offered by the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a key associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and '60s.

At the end of his life, Dr. King was of course challenged within his own movement for his insistence that opposition to the Vietnam War was inseparable from his mission for racial equality in the U.S. Yesterday another veteran of the movement, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, made an eloquent plea for universal tolerance which I like to think would have given Dr. King great pleasure.

My Box Turtle Bulletin colleague Jim Burroway thought Representative Lewis's remarks important enough to transcribe, and I want to share at least part of his transcript. In his post yesterday, Jim set the stage thusly:

In observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday today, Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) appeared on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air to talk about his experiences during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. From 1963 to 1966, he chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, during which he became a close associate of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As he talked about the struggles to achieve basic voting rights for African-Americans, he also reflected on the importance of fighting for civil rights for everyone, including LGBT people.

Terry Gross poses this question: "I’ve heard some African-American leaders say that it’s wrong to make a connection between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement because discrimination against African-Americans and discrimination against gays are completely different things. And being gay and being black are completely different things. What’s your take on that?"

And Representative Lewis replies:

Well, I do not buy that argument. I do not buy that argument. And today I think more than ever before, we have to speak up and speak out to end discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Dr. King used to say when people talked about blacks and whites falling in love and getting married -- you know, one time in the state of Virginia, in my native state of Alabama, in Georgia, and other parts of the South, blacks and whites could not fall in love and get married. -- and Dr. King took a simple argument and said races don’t fall in love and get married, individuals fall in love and get married. It’s not the business of the federal government, it’s not the business of the state government, to tell two individuals that they cannot fall in love and get married.

And so I go back to what I said and wrote those lines a few years ago, that I fought too long and too hard against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up and fight and speak out against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

And you hear people “defending marriage.” Gay marriage is not a threat to heterosexual marriage. It is time for us to put that argument behind us.

You cannot separate the issue of civil rights. It is one of those absolute, immutable principles. You’ve got to have not just civil rights for some, but civil rights for all of us.

It's hard to put it much better than that. Thanks, congressman.

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