I'm sure this is the sort of thing some flunkey from the Johnson Administration said when the first racial quotas came down the pike, long after people forgot that Hubert Humphrey's diet was on the line. It seems to me there are three basic assumptions that often determine where a person comes down about the role of gays in society. On the other end of the spectrum are those who believe they make up this generation's civil-rights movement, deserving not merely of equal treatment but of celebration. According to this view, homosexuality is no more relevant to someone's status than skin color and criticism of any kind is the moral equivalent of racism. The middle position, my position, is that gays are full citizens deserving respect and dignity and the rest, but they are also different from heterosexuals in ways more significant than skin color.
Skin color describes well, skin color.
It is by definition skin deep. But homosexuality is behavioral. I don't know if, as a matter of ethics or morality, it is more or less wrong to leap to a conclusion based on someone's skin color or on someone's sexual status. But I am confident that they are very different things. Gay activists would have us believe that there is no difference between barring a gay man from the Boy Scouts and barring a black man from the Boy Scouts.