"The people who would forbid gays from marrying in this country are those who would have made Rosa Parks sit in the back of the bus," New Paltz (NY) Mayor Jason West recently proclaimed. The 26-year-old college-town mayor, who is enjoying fame for illegally handing out marriage certificates to same-sex couples, is hardly alone among opponents of traditional marriage in claiming the legacy of the civil rights movement for his own cause.

Many veterans of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s disagree, as an article on today's Associated Press wire demonstrates.

"The gay community is pimping the civil rights movement and the history," Boston minister Gene Rivers told the AP. "In the view of many, it's racist at worst, cynical at best." "I don't have a choice to be black and, therefore, had to be faced with the human battle from birth," points out Judge D'Army Bailey. Even Jesse Jackson labels such analogies "a stretch."

If the reductio ad Hitlerum is the smarmiest way to discredit a creditable position, the reductio ad civil rights is the cheapest way to ennoble an ignoble position.