A March in the Wrong Direction

It is therefore gratifying that organizers of the 40th Anniversary rally and march set for Saturday, August 23 in Washington have reached out to the gay community. This year, The Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and PFLAG are listed as conveners. But what message are we being asked to rally behind? The Call for the March mentions race, religion, creed and color and a host of leftist issues, but is silent on sexual orientation.

Early publicity materials condemned the war in Iraq and referred to "the onslaught being waged by the Bush administration and the radical right against all the values we hold dear."

Considering that defending our country against terrorists is a value I hold dear, I do not feel entirely welcomed by that sloganeering, even though I am a Democrat. Bush’s desire to codify the exclusion of gays from civil marriage echoes that of President Clinton, who ran ads on Christian radio stations bragging about his signature on the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

The march’s legislative demands include no gay issues other than bills on hate crimes and employment discrimination, and the social action document ignores gays entirely. It is odd that a fundamental issue like marriage, which is on everyone’s lips and in all the news, is too hot for a civil rights march, while the official demands include normalizing relations with Cuba, opposing ROTC programs, and denouncing U.S. imperialism. If the marchers have time to adopt a foreign policy, they ought to have time to defend gay families. But wait: one of the organizers, Rev. Walter Fauntroy, is a prominent supporter of the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment.

Gay concerns aside, the rhetoric surrounding this year’s event serves not a unifying purpose but that of a partisan, anti-Bush rally. King and Rustin might well have opposed the war in Iraq; King opposed the war in Vietnam, and Rustin was a conscientious objector in World War II. Yet honoring them does not mean I stop thinking for myself. I too opposed the Vietnam War, but that war is not this one. Sometimes defending freedom requires you to fight, as with the brutal Islamic zealots who have declared war on America, and the reckless tyrants who harbor them.

Just as all wars are not the same, principles of non-violent resistance are not universally effective. They worked for Gandhi and King because the people of Britain and America truly believed that their nations stood for something better than the brutal suppression their news organizations reported. Had television cameras not been present at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, the Bloody Sunday attacks by police against peaceful marchers would not have been seen by millions of Americans, and we would not have gotten the Voting Rights Act that year.

It does not honor the memories of King and Rustin to misapply their lessons or to use their memories as a political truncheon with which to beat up the current President for taking our national security problems seriously.

So while I appreciate the gay outreach, including plans for a tribute to Rustin with a showing of the fine documentary Brother Outsider, the protest as announced leaves me feeling like an outsider myself. And that is fine. The Mall sees many rallies, but moments of transcendence are few.

My commemoration will be late at night, when the crowds are gone and I can stand on the very spot at the Lincoln Memorial where King stood forty years ago and hear his majestic, ministerial cadences in my mind’s ear:

"It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Those words still challenge even civil rights workers.