Conservative black leaders have criticized the Obama administration's comparison of North Carolina's transgender law to Jim Crow edicts, saying it trivializes the importance of the civil rights movement,
Christian Post Politics reports.
When the Justice Department last week filed a lawsuit against North Carolina for its law requiring people to use bathrooms in government buildings that match their birth sex, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said: "This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation.
"We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry."
The comparisons were too much for some to take. Project 21, a nationwide group of black conservative leaders,
issued a statement saying they disagreed with opposition to the North Carolina law itself, but were even more outraged by the analogy.
Project 21 member Nadra Enzi said that "as a Black Southern man who grew up fighting what I call 'Jim Crow-lite' in the 1970s-1980s, in Savannah, Georgia… I find the ridiculous transgender/civil rights movement comparison insulting and disrespectful.
"Middle-and upper-income whites in search of artificial oppressed person status can do so without using our history to prop up delusional defenses.
"The fact that co-conspirators in this farce include a [black] President of the United States… and black U.S. Attorney General speaks volumes on how far some have strayed away from the straight and narrow path pioneered by the Civil Rights Movement and the moral culture which produced it."
Another member, Derryck Green, said: "Attaching this insanity to the legacy of civil rights… trivializes everything the brave men and women experienced and sacrificed in the pursuit of social, economic and legal equality…", while Christopher Arps added that
"Civil rights champions were not spat upon, beaten with police batons and sometimes murdered for the right of men to go to the same restroom with little girls.
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