JACKSON-When a woman told Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry she was insulted that people have compared the Gay Rights Movement to the American Civil Rights Movement at a rally Sunday, the democratic presidential hopeful disagreed.
Kerry defended gay rights and explained his plans for improving education and increasing jobs. The rally drew about 1,000 people to Tougaloo College, a historically black college in north Hinds County.
After a an a cappella performance of classic spirituals by the Hinds Community College men’s choir, Kerry took the stage, outlined some issues on his platform and fielded questions from attendees.
Kerry took questions and comments from supporters for about an hour and 15 minutes, including some he disagreed with.
“Most of the people in this country are sick and tired of the onslaught of the homosexual community using the civil rights movement to further their agenda,” an elderly black woman angrily told the senator. “There is no correlation between gay rights and civil rights in terms of what black Americans have gone through. Leave the denigration and the maligning of the civil rights movement out of it.”
Some audience members booed the woman halfway through her comment, but Kerry, motioning with his palms, silenced them.
Kerry drew comparisons between racial discrimination and crimes that were committed against gay people in the 1990s. Kerry referred to Matthew Shepard, a gay college student at the University of Wyoming who was murdered in 1998.
“Let me tell you something. When Matthew Shepard gets crucified on a fence in Wyoming only because he is gay-when Mr. King gets dragged behind a truck down in Texas by chains and his body is mutilated only because he is gay-I think that’s a matter of rights in the United States of America.”
The answer drew enthusiastic applause from the crowd.
Kerry mistakenly referred to James Byrd Jr., a black man who was dragged to death behind a truck in Texas in 1998 by three white men, one of whom was John King Jr.
Kerry elaborated on the gay rights issue, saying he thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman. He said, however, he believes in equal rights for gay couples.
Kerry also went into depth on his education policy, saying he supports improving Head Start, a federal program designed to ready young children from low-income families for school. Kerry said he wants to extend the Head Start program from children ages 0 to 5 to children ages 0 to 8.
“Experts have shown that if you’ve got kids that have really been cared for and nurtured for through those eight years, you’ve got a human being who can learn for the rest of their life,” Kerry said.
Kerry also addressed his “Service for College” plan. Under the plan, high school graduates would earn the equivalent of tuition for four years of an in-state college by serving their communities for two years after high school.
Kerry also said the country needs to seek new international markets to create jobs domestically.
“If you’re gonna have more jobs, you’ve got to have more people to sell to,” Kerry said. “It’s a big world out there. You start running around the world, there’s another 96 percent of human beings on this planet and those economies are growing and changing.”
University of Mississippi Medical Center student Devon Fletcher said she thought he covered the most important issues to her, health care and the environment.
“He had a plan for what he wanted to do,” she said.
Kosciusko resident Billy Brooks said he was satisfied with Kerry’s coverage of relevant issues.
“My criticism is the same as my compliment. He didn’t say much about foreign policy,” Brooks said. “However, Americans are in America. I’m not going to Iraq anytime soon. I’m interested in what’s going on in Mississippi.”
Mississippians will vote in party primaries today, but Kerry’s last serious opponent, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, dropped out of the race after losing 10 primaries on March 2.