Are Gay Rights 'Civil Rights'?
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/14/a...il-rights.html
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As the fight over same-sex marriage and “don’t ask, don’t tell” rages in the courts, Congress, and the media, gay activists and their allies are invoking the language and imagery of the civil-rights battles of a half century ago.
And their efforts are changing the tenor of the debate. Sen. Joe Lieberman, calling for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” told a Connecticut reporter earlier this month that the fight for gay rights is the new “front lines” of the civil-rights movement.
When President Obama included protections for gays and lesbians in federal hate-crime legislation earlier this year, the Associated Press called it “the biggest expansion of the civil-rights-era law in decades.”
And at last week’s federal appellate-court hearing in San Francisco on same-sex marriage, one of the judges pointedly asked whether California voters, whose 2008 passage of Proposition 8 stripped gays of the right to marry, were entitled to reinstate school segregation. “How is this different?”
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