Why the African American community should embrace gay rights.

The Bay Area's Contra Costa Times just published an opinion piece by Pastor and syndicated columnist, Byron Williams. Williams makes some pretty good points, check it out:

WHENEVER THERE is a discussion about gay rights and the African-American community, someone can be depended upon to offer the juvenile critique that the cause of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community is not the same as the historical Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s.

It's not uncommon to hear African-American pastors suggest "my skin cannot be compared with their sin" as a way to poetically justify their homophobia.

This argument assumes a collective understanding of what the Civil Rights Movement is and what the LGBT movement is not.

If one views the civil rights movement and the current LGBT struggle through the linear paradigm of race and sex, I would agree there is little that connects the two.

If, however, one understands the civil rights movement as something that helped America get closer to the democratic values to which it committed itself in 1776, along with the preamble of the Constitution that reads: "We the people of the United States in order form a more perfect union," then I would suggest the LGBT struggle is very much an extension in the ongoing civil rights struggle.

Find the rest of the article after the jump...