Gays & Blacks Again...:

In my opinion it has become a tiresome and ultimately empty platitude of anti-gay social conservatives to make a comparison between sexual orientation & race for the purpose of telling us how being black & being homosexual are not the same, how sexual orientation doesn’t deserve civil rights, etc.

Of course race can meaningfully distinguish itself from “sexual orientation.” The history of race is so wholly unique in this nation and the world that it can distinguish itself with any group that tries to make an analogy with it and ask for civil rights. And here’s the rub: We don’t live in a world where “race & only race” receives civil rights protection and along comes “sexual orientation” asking for the same. Instead we live in world where race, color, ethnic origin, religion, gender, pregnancy, disability, and age receive civil rights protection at the federal level. None of these other groups can make a meaningful analogy with race either. But oh have they have tried—and their failure to make a meaningful analogy did not prevent them from receiving civil rights protection. Here’s Andrew Sullivan citing Shelby Steele, on “gender discrimination”:

It is always both a little flattering and more than a little annoying to blacks when other groups glibly invoke the civil rights movement and all its iconic imagery to justify their agendas for social change. I will never forget, nor forgive, the feminist rally cry of the early '70s: “Woman as nigger.” Here upper-middle-class white women--out of what must have been an impenetrable conviction in their own innocence--made an entire race into a metaphor for wretchedness in order to steal its thunder.

Moreover, even though homosexuals—like every other group on the civil rights list save race—have never been through slavery or Jim Crow, gays have faced far more mistreatment by society than most of the groups who already receive such protection. Again from the same Sullivan article,

But it is nevertheless true that, throughout history, gay Americans have been jailed for being gay, physically attacked, barred from associating with each other, blackmailed, executed, and had their most intimate relationships criminalized. They have been used as scapegoats, described as internal enemies, and subjected to virulent attacks from the very same people who also demonized African Americans.

Thus, the relevant question regarding whether sexual orientation ought to receive civil rights protection is not whether it can make a near perfect analogy with race. Here is how Richard Posner, in his book Sex and Reason, frames the question:

[G]iven Title VII and cognate laws, is there a reason to exclude homosexuals from a protected category that already includes not only racial, religious, and ethnic groups but also women, the physically and mentally handicapped, all workers aged 40 and older, and in some cases, even young healthy male WASPs? Is there less, or less harmful, or less irrational discrimination against homosexuals than against the members of any of these other groups? The answer is no.

p. 323.