Keith Boykin recently spoke at the University of Oregon on race, religion, and sexuality. In the early 1990s, Boykin served in the Clinton administration as the highest-ranking openly gay White House aide. Boykin is considered to be one of the country's leading experts on the intersection of race and sexual orientation.

At the University of Oregon, he compared and contrasted the fight for civil rights for the lesbian and gay community with the fight for civil rights for racial minorities. He criticized prominent African Americans that have refused to equate the two, and made specific reference to a statement that Colin Powell made in during the early 1990s discussion of gays in the military. "Part of what troubled me is that what General Powell was doing in his statement, and what so many pastors do today, is creating a hierarchy of oppression," Boykin said.

Boykin criticized religious leaders who refer to gay rights as "special rights," because the right to marry for gay partners is on par with other fundamental freedoms, such as the right to travel. Moreover, equating gay rights to "special rights" produced heightened expectations of proving that the gay community has suffered more than other minority communities. "We don't have an intelligent enough discourse to be able to separate the stupidity from reality," he said. "At the end of the day, it doesn't matter which group was most oppressed or which group was first oppressed or whether they're identically oppressed. What matters is that no group should be oppressed."