New Jersey's combative Governor Chris Christie, a popular figure in Republican Party circles, caused a stir by inaccurately citing civil rights history to defuse his stance against same sex marriage.
American civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. filed his first lawsuit against race discrimination not in a segregated Southern city but in a not so subtly racist small town in southern New Jersey (NJ).
King filed that lawsuit in 1950 after a gun waving bigot chased King and three companions from the bar he owned in Maple Shade, NJ – a suburb of Philadelphia, Pa. King filed that lawsuit, using an anti-discrimination law approved by New Jersey's state legislature in 1945, while attending seminary school in another Philadelphia suburb.
King's use of that anti-discrimination law illuminates ignorance underlying the recent remark New Jersey's bombastic Republican Governor Chris Christie made when announcing his refusal to support a same sex marriage measure.
Christie, in proclaiming he wanted a public referendum on same sex marriage – not legislative implementation of a measure – declared that civil rights reforms in America's once apartheid South should have been subjected to public referendum.
Black leaders in NJ and across America took the apparently history-challenged Christie to task pointing out that public sentiment in pre-1960s America generally opposed equal rights for non-whites and that laws barred blacks from voting in the South thus blocking their participation in any referendums on their rights.
U.S. Congressman John Lewis, a fabled civil rights activist during the 1960s, said legislation and court rulings were vital for blacks attaining civil rights because if anti-racism protections had been "put to a referendum, we would have never ever won."
NJ State Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver, a Democrat, said civil rights for blacks like same sex marriage for gays is a matter of "equal protection under law" guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Constitutional amendments approved after America's mid-19th Century Civil War heightened equal protection and ended slavery.
That New Jersey anti-discrimination law Dr. King utilised was among the first such statewide measures approved in America. Ironically, NJ was the last Northern state to outlaw slavery.
Dr. King received some cathartic satisfaction from that lawsuit when a judge fined his biased attacker $50 following that bigot's conviction for illegally using a weapon.
Gov. Christie used a disparaging, vulgar slang term calling 15-year legislator and lawyer Gusciora "numbnuts"
A few days after the referendum remark, Christie, frequently mentioned as a Republican vice-presidential selection in 2012, backpedaled, correctly noting the 1960s-era "political climate did not permit" referendums in the South but still wrongly maintaining that civil rights activists "wished" they could have had the referendum option.
Christie, lashing partisan opponents for twisting his referendum remark, maintained his trademark strident stance by castigating the openly gay legislator who sponsored the same sex marriage measure.
Christie's attack on democrat Reed Gusciora reacted to that lawmaker comparing Christie's same sex marriage opposition to that of Southern governors once championing racial segregation.
Gov. Christie used a disparaging, vulgar slang term calling 15-year legislator and lawyer Gusciora "numbnuts" – a slight that metaphorically compares a useless unintelligent person to useless sterile testicles.
The ruckus arising around Christie's referendum remarks overshadows his recent history making nominations of a gay and an Asian to NJ's State Supreme Court. Christie ignited another uproar in May 2010 when he refused to reappoint the only black serving on that state's Supreme Court – the first time in NJ history that a governor did not reappoint a sitting justice.
Gov. Christie replaced that highly respected, veteran black jurist with a white female Republican Party operative with no judicial experience. The gay man Christie recently nominated to the state Supreme Court is black, a NJ mayor and Yale Law graduate with no judicial experience. Christie's other nominee also lacks prior judicial experience.
Public opinion polls currently show a slight majority of Americans supporting same sex marriage. Christie seizes that polling as sanctioning his stance seeking a voter referendum on that marriage issue in New Jersey.
Front-running GOP presidential contenders Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney both oppose same sex marriage with serial adulterer Gingrich calling homosexuality a "sin."
Nearly half of America's 50 states have some form of marriage equality either same sex marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships.
The ruckus over Christie's referendum remark comes at a time of increasingly harsh and uncivil rhetoric from Republican officials across America including gross race-baiting by GOP candidates seeking to unseat America's first black president, Barack Obama.
