Conservative pundit Ann Coulter caused a stir when she asserted that civil rights are a Black thing. No exaggeration. She apparently believes that gays, women, immigrants and any other oppressed group doesn’t deserve America’s most gracious gift of civil rights because they weren’t victims of slavery.

I was discussing her comments with a friend who said simply, and with a weary shrug, “She is really only saying what a lot of Black people are thinking.” Flies in the face of reason that Ann Coulter’s statements could be in line with what a segment of Black America believes.


How true. Many Black people have rejected all comparisons between The Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement. Some have even gone so far as to read civil rights as protecting against discrimination based on race, gender or physical disability, pointedly leaving sexual orientation out of the argument. The argument rejects the notion that the right to choose your life partner is a legal issue. But the right to marry is a legal issue. At the heart of the gay rights struggle is equal treatment under the law. It deals with conferring all of the rights that married couples to same sex couples.

Ann Coulter believes that America doesn’t owe civil rights to gay people, immigrants, or feminists because America has never taken anything away from these groups…according to Coulter, civil rights are just a mea culpa for the historical de jure discrimination Blacks have faced in America. Everyone else, sorry, she’s not sorry.