The president of the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) says that the Obama administration’s assertion that single-sex bathrooms are discriminating against gender-confused individuals in much the same way that blacks experienced discrimination in the United States is a “gross insult” to all who fought for equality for African-Americans.

“There is simply no relation between the struggles that Black Americans have faced and the desire of a tiny minority group to violate the dignity and privacy of women and girls,” said Rev. Bill Owens in a statement sent to Breitbart News. “To suggest some sort of equivalence is a gross insult to all of those who marched with Dr. King and faced fire hoses and hatred in the name of equality.”

Owens reacted Friday to the Obama administration’s imposition of gender ideology on the United States. In the wake of a new North Carolina law that protects the privacy and safety of women and children in public rest rooms, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a lawsuit against North Carolina alleging the law violates the civil rights of gay and transgender individuals to use the bathrooms of their choice.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch argued that a person’s choice of “gender identity” supersedes communities’ common sense privacy rules that women use women’s bathrooms and men use men’s bathrooms.

The U.S. Department of Education also decreed Friday that schools must accommodate a tiny number of apparently gender confused children by taking single-sex bathrooms, single-sex locker rooms, and sexual privacy away from almost 55 million American students in 100,000 K-12 public schools.

Obama has also come out in support of legislation that would amend the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Owens describes HR 3185 as “an affront to the Black community and a theft of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.”

“Black Pastors will not allow the homosexual and transgender community to rob Black Americans of their battle for civil rights!” he asserts. “If the Rev. Martin Luther King were alive to see this today, he would be angered in the same way that Jesus was angered when he turned over the tables of the money changers.”

Owens referred to attempts by the Obama administration to make the LGBT political and social engineering agendas the equivalent of civil rights a “theft and outrageous extortion and usurpation of the Civil Rights Movement.”

“We call all black Americans to stand up and fight for the sanctity of Martin Luther King’s accomplishments for our race,” he said. “There is simply no relation between the struggles that Black Americans have faced and the desire of a tiny minority group to violate the dignity and privacy of women and girls.”

“Transgendered persons are not asking for equal rights—they are asking for special rights that violate the privacy of women and simple common sense,” Owens added. “CAAP calls on all those who oppose this unwarranted expansion of the Civil Rights Act to contact their representatives in Congress today and let them know how you feel about this bill.”

The CAAP Women’s Ministry has launched a petition for women of any race or faith to urge Congress to “protect the dignity and privacy of women and girls and ensure that they (and only they) should be permitted in women’s locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms.”