"It's a different set of rights," he said. "People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want...But when we're talking about a redefinition of an institution, that's different than individual civil rights."

"Segregation was an institution too, in a way. It was right there on the books," countered co-host Joy Behar.

"But here is the difference," Huckabee said. "Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma Bridge."

"Gay bashing goes on, too," Behar said.

Since the passage of California Proposition 8, conservatives such as Family Research Council's Tony Perkins and the Washington Times' Tara Wall have separated the civil rights struggles of gays from those of African-Americans. "Black civil and religious leaders--rightfully--have expressed outrage at the gay community's co-opting 'civil rights' to include gay sex," Wall charged in a Tuesday column. "Blacks were stoned, hung, and dragged for their constitutional right to 'sit at the table.' Whites--gay or not--already had a seat at that table. There is no comparison."

One example of gays of all races "not being at the table" has been chronicled by the openly gay Frank Kameny, who fought against a sweeping ban on gay employees by the US Civil Service Commission after being fired from his position as astronomer for the Army Map Service in 1957. In 1963, he launched the effort to remove homosexuality from classification as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Kameny and Mattachine Society co-founder Jack Nichols organized the first public protest on behalf of gay federal employees at the White House in April of 1965.

In addition to the disparity between the marriage rights, inheritance rights and partnership benefits afforded same-sex couples versus heterosexuals, Americans are protected from hate crimes and job discrimination on the basis of race on a federal level, the same protections are not enjoyed based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Such disparities would be rectified by pending legislation such as the Matthew Shepard Act, and at least partially by the current incarnation of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). In addition, many US states remain "at-will states" for purposes of employment; employers in many locales are free to fire a person not protected by internal policy or local, state or federal law for any reason, including their sexual orientation or gender identity.

16.6% of all hate crimes reported by the FBI in 2007 were motivated by "sexual orientation bias." Many examples of LGBT people being targeted for violence on the basis of their sexual orientation have been chronicled. They include Matthew Shepard of Laramie, Wyoming, who was tortured and left to die in 1998 by two men who met him at a bar. Michael Sandy of New York was hit by a car and killed in October 2006 while fleeing a violent robbery attempt by a group of young men who specifically targeted a gay man on the idea that one would be less likely to fight back. Lawrence King, 15, of southern California was gunned down in February by classmate Brandon McInerney after King asked him to "be his Valentine." In May 2003, Sakia Gunn, 15, was propositioned by two men and stabbed to death by one of them after she and a friend said they were lesbians.

Huckabee disagreed that his state's Initiative 1, passed this month, targets gays by barring all unmarried couples from fostering or adopting children. "I think what it really does is try to affirm that the best environment for a child," he said, "is when you have both a father and mother figure in that home. And that's the ideal. That's how the next generation is created, and it's the best thing we can do to train the next generation to be our replacements."

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg took issue with the ban. "There are so many instances where straight couples, who should be the ideal, torture and hurt these children," she noted. "It would be an interesting thing, Mike, I think, if we all said, 'you know what what we're going to do...we're going to say, unless you can get all the foster kids and all the kids who need to be adopted adopted, no one else can have another damn baby until we take care of all the children that [need it]'...What's happened is, effectively, this has been cut off."

The following clip is from ABC's The View, broadcast on November 18, 2008: