Obama includes gay rights movement in Selma memorial speech
By Ryan Love
President Barack Obama made reference to the gay rights movement during a memorial speech in Selma yesterday (March 7).
He was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the civil rights protest march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“Because of what they did, the doors of opportunity swung open not just for African-Americans, but for every American. Women marched through those doors. Latinos marched through those doors. Asian-Americans, gay Americans, and Americans with disabilities came through those doors. Their endeavors gave the entire South the chance to rise again, not by reasserting the past, but by transcending the past,” Obama told the crowd.
“We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the ’50s.
“Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was 30 years ago.
“To deny this progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.”
Paying tribute to the “warriors of justice” who work to change the US, he also made reference to the Stonewall Riots: “We are the gay Americans whose blood ran on the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge.”
President Obama’s speech can be watched in full below: