Since Feb. 12, the City of San Francisco has issued marriage licenses to more than 3,000 gay couples. According to news reports and polls, most blacks oppose this. So I know that it would probably be safer to paddle a canoe into a hurricane than to endorse gay marriage. But that's what I'm doing. And I'm doing it as a straight, Christian black man because I believe we aren't connecting the dots between the discrimination that our people historically have faced, and the discrimination that gays also have faced.

Instead, we've been duped into debating whether or not homosexuality is a choice, suggesting that if being gay is a choice then gays deserve whatever discrimination they get.

Choice or not, discrimination is wrong. And we of all people should know this.

We heterosexuals choose whom we will marry. But it wasn't until 1967 that all of us heterosexuals were completely free to choose whomever we wanted to marry. That's when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed state bans on interracial marriages. Until then in many states, blacks and whites couldn't marry. This was discrimination, plain and simple.

It wasn't right then for states to discriminate against men and women who wanted to marry across racial lines. It's not right now for cities, counties and states to discriminate against gays who want to legally bind their relationships.

But unfortunately, our culture has always winked at bigotry directed toward gay people. Like many straight men, I grew up doing what boys do when they spot one of their own displaying feminine interests or tendencies. I, too, called these little boys sissies, punks and faggots. I, too, was wrong. Without knowing it, I was being a bigot. I was treating one of my classmates harshly because he was different from the rest of us. And by the way, I doubt my effeminate third-grade classmate had 'chosen' to be the way he was. He either was born that way, or forced by some predator to be that way. Either way, it was wrong to blame him for being what he was.

As an adult, I see even more clearly what happens when we discriminate against a group of people. We make them targets. That's what happened to Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming college student who was beaten, lashed to a fence post and killed in 1998. It's also what happened to Billy Joe Gaither, who was tortured, burned and murdered in a small Alabama town in 1999. And if our discrimination doesn't make them targets, it forces some of them underground, where they are more likely to engage in pathological behaviors that inevitably seep into the larger population.

Witness the closet for the new millennium, the so-called 'down-low' phenomenon: men having sex with men, often with multiple partners and without condoms, but without openly identifying themselves as gay or bisexual. Couple it with the overall rise in HIV infections among blacks as well as the disproportionately high rate of infections among black women, and it's hard to deny that there is a connection.

Discrimination encourages hate. And hate is what killed Shepard and Gaither. It's also what killed many of our ancestors. The specific rationale for discriminating against gays may be different from the rationale for discriminating against blacks, but the hate is the same and comes from the same place.

And to my fellow Christians, I say that hate is not Christian. Discrimination is not Christian.

If they don't want gays to marry in their churches, fine. Churches aren't obligated to violate their own creeds and beliefs. But governments don't have the right or obligation to discriminate, not even when ostensibly acting on the will of the people, as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will argue when California launches its legal challenge to block San Francisco from issuing any more marriage licenses.

All of us, regardless of race, economic status, religion, gender or gender preference, are equal under the law. For gays and straights, it is downright un-American to accept anything less. 

David Person is an editorial writer and columnist for the Huntsville Times.