TIME.com: Viewpoint: Civil Rights and Gay Rights -- Page 1

TIME.com: Viewpoint: Civil Rights and Gay Rights -- Page 1: "Of course there are important differences. 'The comparison with slavery is a stretch,' Jesse Jackson asserted in a speech at Harvard last year, 'in that some slave masters were gay, in that gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution and in that they did not require the Voting Rights Act to have the right to vote.' All of which is true. Race is most often, rightly or not, signified physically. While gays have been, and still are in many instances, forced to play straight, they at least had a refuge. It was historically difficult, usually impossible, and often illegal, for a black person to pass as white (even if 15/16ths of his blood was). They had nowhere to hide.

So yes, in the game of Who's Been More Systematically Oppressed?, black people win hands down. But that doesn't discount the hardships of other groups. (Remember the federal Defense of Marriage Act?) And it doesn't mean everyone isn't entitled to equal rights. Through the years, America has dished out enough oppression to go around. Much of it has been strikingly similar. The anti-miscegenation laws that were enacted in much of the South were rooted in interpretations of the Bible. Interracial intimacy was seen as unnatural. Blacks were put forth as filthy sub-humans who wanted to muddy white bloodlines and thus destroy the goodness of the white race. Race mixing was akin to bestiality. Sound familiar? 'Defenders' of marriage, from Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to Justice Antonin Scalia to Pope Benedict, have tossed out arguments just like these in their quest to keep same-sex couples from the altar."