When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. marched, joining him in the front lines were Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. 

              When Clarence Mitchell, Jr. lobbied the Congress to pass the Civil Rights Acts, he spoke on behalf of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, whose members include the disability and gay rights communities.

               When a lawyer for the ACLU, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, argued before the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause barred discrimination on the basis of a person’s gender, Justice Thurgood Marshall agreed. 

             When one of my colleagues argues during the floor debate that civil rights does not extend to gay rights and the Family Research Council praises the bill’s opponents for speaking out against “the attempted hijacking of the concept of civil rights,” they are dead wrong.

March 11