[Vision2020] Harrassment of a Civil Rights Legend (NY POST column)

[Tim Lohrmann]

Visionaries,
   A bit dated, but interesting.
   TL


HARASSMENT OF A CIVIL RIGHTS LEGEND
New York Post
by Maggie Gallagher 

Tuesday, August 7, 2001 

After the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a black civil rights
leader, joined an interfaith, multicultural coalition
supporting a Federal Marriage Amendment that would
block court-imposed gay marriage, Rick Rosendall, vice
president of the Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance,
circulated the following e-mail: 

"I wish to thank Mark Thompson, chair of the NAACP-DC
Police Task Force, who called Rev. Fauntroy to convey
my objections to Fauntroy's participation in such an
attack on the gay community. Mark reports that
Fauntroy expressed strong feelings about marriage and
is immovable on the subject. So Fauntroy wraps himself
in democracy and the civil rights movement while
seeking to disenfranchise a group of Americans. Truly
obscene. 

"Call Rev. Fauntroy at home . . . and register your
objection to his alliance with anti-gay bigots. Tell
him how offensive it is that he -- a civil rights
veteran, of all people -- would deny to others
freedoms that he himself enjoys." 

Here's the question: Will these kinds of uncivil,
name-calling, harassment tactics, demonizing those who
disagree, ultimately succeed? If decent people permit
these tactics to be used against a man called a "civil
rights legend," who is safe? 

My own column opposing gay marriage provoked curiously
uniform responses from gay activists. Fauntroy is a
black conservative, they told me, not a real civil
rights leader, like Coretta Scott King. 

Curiouser and curiouser. In August 2000 you could find
Rev. Fauntroy at a press conference denouncing racial
profiling organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton. In
January, he was again shoulder to shoulder with
Sharpton, denouncing Bush's illegitimate election. A
founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus,
current president of the National Black Leadership
Council (an arm of the CBC), Rev. Fauntroy probably
agrees with me about very little politically, except
for the importance of protecting marriage. 

Makes sense to me. Marriage is neither a conservative
nor a liberal issue; it is a universal human
institution, guaranteeing children fathers, and
pointing men and women toward a special kind of
socially as well as personally fruitful sexual
relationship. 

Gay marriage is the final step down a long road
America has already traveled toward
deinstitutionalizing, denuding and privatizing
marriage. It would set in legal stone some of the most
destructive ideas of the sexual revolution: There are
no differences between men and women that matter,
marriage has nothing to do with procreation, children
do not really need mothers and fathers, the diverse
family forms adults choose are all equally good for
children. 

One reason that all major world religions strive to
channel human sexuality toward this relatively narrow
definition of marriage -- fruitful, potentially
procreative sex between men and women (while either
discouraging or merely tolerating other forms of
sexual expression) -- is that only societies that
adopt this sexual ethic grow to become large, complex
cultures in the first place. If I am right, gays as
much as any other Americans have a stake in the
re-creation of a functioning marriage culture. 

The quiet, back-door demonization and harassment of
Fauntroy is consistent with the ongoing attempt by
certain gay organizations to shut down debate over
this dangerous transformation that the courts are
wreaking on our marriage laws. Increasingly, gay
activists are the self-righteous zealots, stigmatizing
any disagreement with their point of view, no matter
how reasoned and civil, as bigotry, hate speech and
discrimination. 

In the civil rights movement, it was the racial bigots
who engaged in such name-calling. In the gay marriage
movement, it is increasingly the advocates of gay
marriage who claim the right to hate and stigmatize
Americans who have a different point of view. 

I don't know what to call a group that feels free to
dub a civil rights legend a bigot because he does not
support same-sex marriage, and to circulate his home
phone number over an Internet list so broad that one
of them even ended up in my mailbox. Tolerant isn't
the word that comes to mind. 
 


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