NAACP Leader: “Gay Community Stop Hijacking The Civil Rights Movement”

A leader of the NAACP has come out attacking gays, and he is demanding the “gay community stop hijacking the civil rights movement.” Rev. Keith Ratliff Sr., president of the Iowa-Nebraska chapter of the NAACP, spoke at a marriage rally in Des Moines on Tuesday, adding, “Deviant behavior is not the same as being denied your right to vote,” and calling any parallel between the African-American civil rights movement and the gay civil rights movement an “insult.”

Ratliff, according to reports, also condemned any idea that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have supported gay rights or civil same-sex marriage.

A Baptist minister for over thirty years, Ratliff is also an NAACP National Board Member, and, according to his church website, had worked closely with Tom Vilsack, when he was Governor of Iowa. Vilsack is now the Secretary of Agriculture and was recently embroiled in the Shirley Sherrod firing.

This is not Ratliff’s first attack on the LGBT community, and it directly counters his leadership role at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose mission clearly states, “is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.”

Ratliff’s anti-gay actions also go directly against the teachings of the NACCP’s president, and Chairman, Benjamin Jealous, and Jealous’ predecessor, Julian Bond. Additionally, Dr. King’s right-hand man, Bayard Rustin, who planned the historic march on Washington, was openly-gay.

Jealous last year said, “I personally support marriage equality,” and Bond has spoken publicly and eloquently in support of same-sex marriage.

Listen: “Julian Bond, NAACP Chair, Speaks To NJ Senate Supporting Gay Marriage”

Ratliff, reportedly a Democrat, has fervently supported Iowa’s former Republican gubernatorial candidate, Bob Vander Plaats, who ran — and lost — on an extreme ant-gay platform.

After Iowa’s historic Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for marriage equality in that state, Ratliff stood up in his church, denounced the ruling, and received a standing ovation.

Ratliff is quoted as saying, “We believe the homosexual lifestyle is wrong,” and in an infamous op-ed wrote that “everything about homosexuality conflicts with natural law,” and added, “homosexuality will always be un-natural and un-healthy.”

In 2009, New Jersey Senator Nia Gill, an African-American, delivered an impassioned speech during her state’s marriage equality debate, and said,

“If you look at the constitution, at its intent, the constitution intended that African-Americans would never be full participants.

“The legislators – the female ones – would not be here, because the constitution never intended for a woman to have the right to vote. And if we looked further at what the constitution intended – as if it is a stagnant body – then we know that disabled people would have no rights, under the equal protection clause, that they have access to public buildings.

“It is a civil rights issue – not because African-Americans own the copyright to civil rights, it is a civil rights issue in the analysis of the equal protection of the fourteenth amendment in the constitution. And maybe some in my community want to hold on to it, because it’s ours. Because our blood has been shed for the right to vote, and we jealously guard that as a re-affirmation of being American. And so we hold it, because no one can do civil rights and have civil rights better than we do. That’s emotional, but it is certainly not an analysis of the constitutional imperatives that face us. It [marriage equality] is a civil rights issue.”