A prominent leader of the NAACP has
called on the gay community to stop 'hijacking' the civil rights
movement.
At
a Tuesday rally held on the steps of the Iowa Statehouse, Rev.
Keith Ratliff Sr., the pastor of Maple Street Missionary Baptist
Church in Des Moines, told about 500 supporters of a constitutional
amendment banning gay marriage in the state that he was insulted at
the suggestion that the late Rev. Martin Luther King would support
LGBT rights.
Ratliff is also the president of the
Iowa-Nebraska chapter of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) and is listed on the group's website as a
national board officer.
Julian Bond, the group's chairman, is
an ardent supporter of gay rights. At a gay fundraiser in 2005, he
told a Virginia crowd that “applying for a marriage license”
could “change the world.” Bond publicly opposed California's gay
marriage ban, Proposition 8.
Ratliff claimed that gay rights
advocates had “hijacked” the civil rights debate.
“For deviant behavior is not the same
thing as being denied the right to vote because of the color of one's
skin,” Ratliff told the crowd. “For deviant behavior is not the
same thing as being denied where one may sit on a bus.”
“What an insult to the civil rights
movement.”
“While I enjoy the conversations of
those who love to suggest that if the late Rev. Doctor Martin Luther
King were alive he would be supportive of gay, lesbian marriage and
bisexual and transgender relationships. Well, there is nothing in
King's writings or speeches that suggest that.”
“Gay community stop hijacking the
civil rights movement,” he added. (The video is embedded in the
right panel of this page.)