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Life long civil rights activist, teacher, thinker,
writer and NAACP Board Chairman, Julian Bond
continues to speak out for the civil rights of gay people.
The 66-year-old Bond’s latest expression of his
belief that gay rights are civil rights comes in an interview
with AOL’s Black
Voices, published this week (September 25, 2006).
 Black
Voices asked Bond if it was his objective to change the mind
of those who believe in Biblical literalism and others about
gay marriage. He responded by saying,
”No, it's my objective to say, you can believe
whatever you want to believe but marriage is a CIVIL affair,
and you don't have a right to impose your rights on the civil
society. If you want to say gay people can't be married in your
church, OK. But you can't say they can't be married in City
Hall because of something you read in the Bible.”
Bond’s support for gay rights is not new. In
an Ebony Magazine article he authored in July of 2004, he answered
his own question: Are Gay Rights Civil Rights?
"'Civil rights’ are positive legal prerogatives – the
right to equal treatment before the law. These are rights
shared by all – there is no one in the United States who does
not – or should not - share in these rights.”
”Gay and lesbian rights are not ‘special rights’ in any way.
It isn’t ‘special’ to be free from discrimination – it is
an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship. The right
not to be discriminated against is a common-place claim we
all expect to enjoy under our laws and our founding document,
the Constitution. That many had to struggle to gain these
rights makes them precious – it does not make them special
and it does not reserve them only for me or restrict them
from others.”
Black Voices advanced the belief that the Civil
Rights movement had its foundation in the black church. Black
Voices asked Bond how gay rights can advance when there is so
much opposition coming from the pulpit.
”The Civil Rights Movement had the support of a number of
ministers but typically, if you look at Montgomery in 1965
and '66 or Birmingham in '63, it was a minority of ministers
who were engaged in the movement and who had their congregation
engaged. The rest of them are sitting on the sidelines saying,
'Good, keep it up, I'm with you,' or doing nothing at all.
And that pretty much is the condition now. [The clergy] is
a fairly conservative bunch of people. They’re not as much
into social change as we'd like to think they are.”
Dr. Bond also asserted his long-held belief that
a change in law is something that must happen if a movement
is going to succeed. But he recognized that a challenge to the
gay rights movement is the thinking about homosexuality in the
black community.
”You've got to have a change in attitudes primarily
because there's a frightening level of homophobia in the black
community. And there's a frightening level of ignorance. Because
there are many people who believe that somehow gay and lesbian
people choose to be gay and lesbian. And that's just nonsense.
And it goes against all the science that we know about. And
how people can believe it is just a mystery to me.”
Bond has always believed an important part of
understanding the advancement of civil rights for any group
of people is removing the idea that giving rights to one group
damages another group’s rights. In regard to this issue of rights
gained and lost, Bond told Black Voices the following:
“I don’t think we do it in order for them to become
your allies. I think you do it in the hopes that they’ll become
your allies. But there are no guarantees that they will. And
experience teaches us that many of them will not. No matter
who the ‘they’ is. You don’t do it for any profit for yourself;
you do it because it is right.”
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