The belief that homosexual acts are immoral is not the same kind of claim as the belief that black people are inferior because they are black. When we deem homosexual acts immoral, we are not stigmatizing a class of persons; we’re exercising our moral reason about the rightness and wrongness of actions. Unlike racism, principled opposition to homosexual rights has a firm basis. It’s normal to judge behavior, including (and perhaps especially) sexual behavior. That’s why describing homosexual acts as immoral is not at all like calling black men and women inferior. To merge sexual liberation into the civil-rights movement dramatically raised the stakes in public debate. The Selma analogy makes traditional views of sexual morality as noxious as racism, and in so doing encourages progressives to adopt something like a total-war doctrine. The implications is that people who hold such views should have no voice in American society and that homosexuality should be aggressively affirmed in our public and private institutions, while dissent is punished.
R. R. Reno, "The Selma Analogy," First Things (May 2012): 4-5.