As the District of Columbia City Council passes a marriage equality law to the District’s gay and lesbian couples, the debate over whether gay rights are a part of the civil rights movement come to the forefront:

“It is bringing truth to the words ‘all men are created equal,’ ” said David A. Catania (I-At Large).

“When one group is denied a right, we are all denied that right,” said Jim Graham (D-Ward 1).

But perhaps the fiercest opposition to the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in the District has come from members of the generation that led the fight for civil rights nearly half a century ago, some of whom said they think that comparing gay rights with the battle that blacks waged is misguided, even insulting.

Since Catania introduced the bill, many of his most avid supporters have been children of civil rights veterans, who see the cause as the continuation of their parents’ and grandparents’ struggle.

Kwame Brown (D-At Large) supports gay marriage, seeing it as the next chapter in the fight for equality. But his father, a political campaign consultant in the city, bristles when the drive for same-sex marriage is compared with the civil rights movement.

“You can choose to be gay or not,” Marshall Brown said. “You can never choose to be black or not.”

Not so, his son said. “People are born that way,” Kwame Brown said. “That could be a generational difference between the way he thinks and the way I think.”

“That’s a fair argument,” the father said when told of his son’s view about sexual orientation. But the elder Brown wasn’t about to equate gay rights with the civil rights movement. Homosexuals, he said, “can hide it so easily, but we can’t hide that we’re black.”

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