Community leaders with diverging views on same-sex marriage and civil rights came together this past week for a discussion hosted by San Diego’s Catfish Club. For more than three decades, the Catfish Club has provided a weekly venue for airing divergent views on topics critical to the diversity of San Diego. The club invited speakers to present opposing views on the same-sex marriage debate – an issue that has polarized the African-American community – at a lunch-time meeting on Friday, Mar. 12. Leading the discussion were speakers Bryan N. Wildenthal, director of Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s Center for Law and Social Justice, and San Diego Voice & Viewpoint publisher John Warren.

During his presentation, Wildenthal, who was on hand to present a constitutional law perspective on the debate and who also happens to be a gay man, clarified the difference between civil marriage and religious marriage and emphasized that the debate was about obtaining recognition for gay civil marriage, which would in turn grant couples the thousands of rights that come with marriage.

“The issue of religious gay marriage is already settled,” Wildenthal explained. “Gay couples already have religious marriage if they want that and it’s nothing new. It’s old news. That statement may surprise many people, but it’s a simple fact of life and [it’s] constitutional law and there’s no way it can be changed unless we repeal the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees all of us freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Nor would this be affected by any other proposed amendments out there, such as those President Bush has endorsed, because those only deal with legal recognition of civil marriage and they would not, as far as I can tell, affect religious freedom or effectively repeal the First Amendment.”

Wildenthal said that for gays and lesbians, marriage equality is a matter of gaining the civil rights that are afforded to people whose unions are legally recognized by the state and federal government. While many argue that religious and civil marriage are intrinsically connected, Wildenthal supported his claim that they were two different institutions, citing the Catholic Church as an example. The Catholic Church, he said, does not recognize divorce, yet many members of the Catholic Church do in fact divorce. While those couples are still married in the eyes of the church, they can still remarry outside of the church.

During his presentation, Wildenthal admitted that the issue of marriage equality will most likely be decided in the courts, and he referred to San Francisco’s issuance of marriage licenses as their “Valentine’s Revolution.”

“The city was simply using one of several time honored methods of triggering a test case,” Wildenthal said. “The city and the gay couples involved may well lose ultimately in the court, and that remains to be seen, but there is nothing lawless or anarchistic about testing the issue. Quite the contrary: The city and the gay couples are deliberately invoking the majestic procedures of the law to resolve this issue peacefully.”

As publisher and editor of theVoice & Viewpoint, Warren is in many ways a voice of San Diego’s African-American community. Warren’s background includes activism in civil rights, law, politics and education, and he addresses those issues weekly in the Voice & Viewpoint. Often described as outspoken, Warren was candid in his opposition to gay marriage and the gay civil rights movement.

“One of the problems is, the civil rights movement has been kidnapped, if you will, and [has been] added to this issue, as if the issue of gay marriages or gay lifestyle are synonymous with the civil rights struggle,” Warren said to attendees. “That’s not the case because … we clearly agree that it is a class, the homosexual community constitutes a class, but it is a class that is not protected in the same context.”

Warren went on to discuss the 1967 Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia that brought down anti-miscegenation laws banning African-Americans from marrying whites. While the state argued that the laws were valid because they did not discriminate against one race (according to Virginia, both races were being penalized equally by the law), Warren went on to say that the reason the Supreme Court knocked down the laws was because the laws were based on race.

“That couldn’t stand,” said Warren, “because the whole reason we ended up with a constitutional amendment was because people had been discriminated against based on color and based on race and we fought those battles.”

Warren added that he felt that same-sex marriage related to a lifestyle choice, and that he has a problem with that because gays and lesbians want to use that choice to “change the very basic fabric of the society as a whole, to accommodate them as a part of society.”

“If they were discriminated against in the sense of blacks, with the issues that we had in discrimination in that we were locked out and we were abused and all the things that happened, it would be a whole different scenario,” Warren said. “It is not the same thing; the people who suffered discrimination in terms of race did not have a choice. We were born the color that we were. We were put into categories because of our color and we had no way of getting out of it and yet we had certain fundamental rights because we were born as a part of this country.”

Wildenthal conceded that the civil rights movement is not entirely the same as the current gay civil rights movement that is going on in America; but he said there were clear comparisons and emphasized that the GLBT civil rights movement was not “kidnapped” from the African-American community.

“The term civil rights as a broad umbrella term cannot be restricted to the issue of race or racial groups and with all respect, contrary to what Dr. Warren has said, it cannot be restricted to personal characteristics that are inborn and are not chosen,” Wildenthal said. “Leaving aside the issue of whether sexual orientation is [a choice], the issue of civil rights does apply to religious minorities and groups, people are not born with a particular religion. They chose a religion and so, as a broad umbrella term, civil rights refer to the right of every human being, all people to dignity and equal rights. Unless one is to maintain that gay and lesbian people are not human and are not people, I think it is deeply offensive to suggest that we cannot use the language of at least civil rights to talk about our issues.”

From the outset of the discussion, organizers said that the goal was not to try and change people’s minds on the issue, but to inform the community and let them make their own decisions.