When I first came out in the 1980s, I was met with a level of sadness, resignation, regret, and toleration. Yet I was one of the lucky ones. It was a heavy, tortured, and difficult time.
By contrast, when I got married a little over a year ago to my partner of more than 20 years, I was overwhelmed by the love and joy that poured out for us. We have become so accustomed to being astonished by the pace of change that it is now routine to say things like, "I never believed this would have happened in my lifetime."
Even those with the strongest critique of the LGBTQ movement’s priorities have felt a sense of recognition that was hard to put into words when the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land. We felt it in our bodies that something significant had changed. We felt that we mattered differently in the eyes of the state, even if in the hearts of some of our neighbors and friends we still are excluded and judged. We felt seen and it made a difference. We saw change happen and we knew we had something to do with that change.
Religious communities have a lot to be proud of as we celebrate this moment. In the last 10 years we have changed the story — that you can't be religious and support LGBTQ people — to a diversified religious landscape where some believe that LGBTQ people are sinful, some think that we aren't sinful but our actions are, some don't know what to think, and many think that to support LGBTQ equality is an act of faith. We have moved as a country to thinking about Christians as monolithically antagonistic to LGBTQ people, to understanding that there are diverse perspectives within the Christian tradition; that no one group can claim the entire Christian experience as their own.
While clergy have dutifully shown up in their collars at rallies, on television, and in public debates, much of the work has been done in our congregations. The work is often slow going, but because of it we have clearly seen openings in some of the most conservative denominations and houses of worship in the country. We need to seize this moment to go where we have not been welcomed before and engage those we once denounced and who denounced us, because the lives of LGBTQ youth that grow up in households where scripture is still used to shame and harm are very much at stake.
But just as we consider how we continue the work after this court victory, we have to recognize that justice does not stand for "just us." The conversation about LGBTQ justice must be intricately tied to systemic racism in our country. All one has to do is look at the rise in murders of transgender women of color to see the connection.
Or as Rev. Dr. William Barber of the Moral Mondays Movement said about the massacre at Emanuel AME church in Charleston, "they got the perpetrator but the killer (racism) is still at large."
I had the privilege of traveling with four other religious leaders — we were black, white, straight, gay — from Sojourners' Summit in Washington, D.C., to Charleston. We delivered 5,000 prayers to the families who lost their loved ones in this domestic terrorist attack. While there, our group recognized Lucy McBath, a mother who has become a spokesperson for ending gun violence after her teenage African American son, Jordan, was shot dead by a white man because he thought he was playing his music too loud. We held her and we wept. Deep, full bodied, conspicuous weeping. From out of that embrace Lucy started singing, “Hush, hush, someone’s calling my name. Hush, someone’s calling my name.”
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, the pastor of Middle Collegiate church in New York — whom we affectionately call Storm, from X-Men lore, because she can change the emotional weather in any gathering she’s in — gestured to the crowd to join us. We sang spirituals together and civil rights anthems. A young, local #BlackLivesMatter organizer led the crowd in the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The music transformed the crowd. It called out our grief, our love, and our joy at being together, in caring community.
Burials and marriages sit next to each other in uncomfortable tension. In one day, marriage equality became the law of the land and the nation witnessed the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney.
When I think about that trip to Charleston with its confederate flag, slave auction block, statues to slave holders, and museums honoring the daughters of the confederacy, it makes it a whole lot harder to fully believe in the hashtag #lovewins. When I see such unrelenting and unmitigated violence against black men and women by police, when I see a school to prison pipeline where police are becoming the new principles and jail the new detention, when I see the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and a racialized economics that keeps black and brown people poor and is making them poorer, it feels like we have gone backwards rather than forwards. And when I see the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that racism has infused a largely white-led movement for LGBTQ justice — an infusion I have been complicit in even as I have attempted to critique it — my conscience convicts me.
And so I sit between two popular Twitter hashtags marking the victory of marriage equality and the massacre in Charleston: #lovewins and #propheticgrief. I know that in this one moment, love has won a precious victory that allows me the privilege to be healthy, loved, and fully seen. I also know that at this moment systemic racism has murdered nine beautiful people and brutalized countless others.
It is a moment in time that asks us to both celebrate and mourn, and more than anything else reminds us of the work yet to be done.
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