Likely you’ve heard the claim “gay is the new black.” It’s been repeated over and over in recent years to equate the plight of blacks in America during the Civil Rights era with the new plight of homosexuals today.

While there are overlapping similarities between the two movements, sexual orientation and ethnicity are fundamentally different. Ethnicity is innate and unchangeable in a way that “sexual orientation” is not. Even if someone can be “born gay,” the gospel saves sinners and has the power to change evil desires.

Both movements value constituencies, or preferred minority groups, in order to gain power. Therefore, many Americans see themselves as part of a group instead of one whole. Constituencies preserve the “us against them” mentality and further divide America. This mentality has crept into the church and works against gospel unity.

In this four-minute video, Voddie Baucham explains the similarities between the Civil Rights and so-called Gay Rights Movement, while highlighting the significant differences between ethnicity and sexual orientation. The following is a lightly edited transcript.

What is the difference between the Civil Rights Movement and the so-called Gay Rights Movement of today? Not a whole lot. Unfortunately, I think there are some things that we accepted philosophically in the Civil Rights Movement that were not based in biblical truth. And those things are being applied in the Gay Rights Movement the exact same way and now we are calling them out.

For example, the idea of seeing people as constituencies and seeing rights as rights for constituencies of people is prominent in both movements. This continued division based on our constituencies and so-called communities is problematic. We’ve embraced a hyphenated understanding of ourselves as opposed to a view that sees us as one people.

The homosexual community is latching onto some of those very concepts. These concepts, by the way, are rooted and grounded in cultural Marxism. That was the goal of Gramscian Marxism. Divide people up into constituencies, and then the way you gain power is by making promises and representing particular constituencies. Now you never give them what you promise, but by creating this idea of constituencies and being the one who is the representative of the constituencies, you gain power and you keep your power to the degree that things don’t get better for your constituency. If things get better for your constituency, you lose your power.

So even when gains are made, you have to downplay those and go looking for other things that are problems. That is the way you keep your power.

The homosexual community has latched onto that approach and has identified itself as a constituency deserving of our attention and pity. They did so intentionally using the AIDS crisis. The direct result is they now have achieved a one-to-one correlation that we are finding it very hard to move away from.

So are there differences between ethnicity and so-called sexual orientation? Absolutely there are. Ethnicity is innate and unchangeable. So-called sexual orientation is not innate and is changeable. We know this. First Corinthians 6 is two-thousand-year-old evidence that people can stop being gay. So we know that it is neither innate, nor is it unchangeable. There are huge differences between the two. However, if all you are doing is using the language of the culture and the idea of people as constituencies, then you end up right where we are, and it is hard to stop that train.