As a nation, our greatest national resource has always been moral obtuseness. In the Wild West town that is American democracy, it's possible to deny dignity and equality to those outside of one's own posse and still wear the white hat of righteousness.

Discrimination is always obvious to the aggrieved, but oppressors have a knack for developing a nagging astigmatism when clarity of vision is called for. It's an irony that has manifested itself throughout history.

Take the recent meeting-of-the-minds between white cultural conservatives and black leaders and clergy who were active in the civil rights movement a generation ago. Though both groups have little in common except mutual resentment going back to the "dreadful unpleasantness" of the antebellum era, it hasn't stopped a marriage of convenience that has infamy written all over it.

Maybe it takes a war of emancipation to show who your real "friends" are. Perhaps this irony of history accounts for why an unconscionable number of black leaders and clergy have begun to sound like George Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama in 1963 when it comes to gay rights and the spiritual legacy of the civil rights movement.

"Homosexuals were never enslaved in America," they never tire of telling their congregations and hapless constituents. "Gays and lesbians have never labored under anything like 'the curse of Ham.' Any appeal to the legacy of the civil rights movement by 'sodomites' is heresy. Everyone knows that the most successful social revolution in American history was heterosexual in orientation. Hence, the 'we' in 'We Shall Overcome' is copyright protected."

As a matter of fact, Bayard Rustin, the gay organizer of the freedom rides of the 1940s, was encouraged by his colleagues in the civil rights movement to go to the proverbial back of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott that he helped organize. Ever the good soldier, Rustin kept his mouth shut and mounted his cross.

Given a choice, black folks would have preferred another 300 years of slavery to being led by an openly gay black man who had once been a member of the Communist Party. Truly, there is no oppression so ignominious that homophobia can't trump it.

How does one account for this moral stinginess? Given the warm reception blacks endure in America as all-purpose hell-catchers even today, is there any justification for withholding the symbolic blessing of the civil rights movement from another group inspired by it?

What would have happened if a delegation from India had visited Martin Luther King on the eve of the historic 1963 March on Washington that Rustin helped organize?

If emissaries from Mahatma Gandhi's Congress Party had insisted that nonviolent resistance was the exclusive property of those who opposed British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent in 1947, would it have deterred MLK from exhorting the crowd with his dream of equality between Americans of all colors?

If a delegation of Orthodox rabbis had knocked on King's door to remind him of their exclusive cultural provenance over the words, cadences and oratory of the Old Testament prophets he patterned himself after, would he have given it a second thought?

Since when is it moral to obey a cease-and-desist order from those who interpret others' strides toward freedom as less legitimate than their own?

As King proved with countless sermons, no group has a monopoly on suffering. All culturally determined redemption songs are part of humanity's collective blessing.

King wouldn't have had any problem denouncing the commissioners of Rhea County for passing an amendment to Tennessee's criminal code this week that allows homosexuals to be charged with crimes against nature. It would've been second nature for him to do so.

You don't have to be a Jewish prophet to speak truth to power or a Gandhian to oppose injustice with nonviolence. When it comes to claiming the righteous legacy of civil rights, we are all black.