rivka

It poured rain all day here in Baltimore, and then the sun came out and made the streets sparkle just in time for the Pride Parade. As if it weren't already clear which side God is on. (After all, Jesus had two dads.)

Baltimore's parade is fairly small and low-key. We watched until our church came by, marched with them to the end, and found another spot to watch the rest. Alex had the bright idea of wearing her princess costume. (We firmly vetoed the shiny plastic high heels, much to her chagrin.) She got a lot of positive attention for it, including a shout-out from the reviewing platform.



Most surprising parade hand-out of all time: child-sized neon plastic handcuffs, actual locking ones that come with a matching little neon plastic key. The guy giving them out made a special delivery right into Alex's hands and into the hands of the little boy sitting next to us. Handcuffs. Huh.

Pride always makes me nostalgic. Riding on the back of my friend Emily's motorcycle with the Dykes on Bikes in Portland, the summer we graduated from college. The Dyke March organized by the Lesbian Avengers the night before the Pride Parade, tramping down the street chanting "We're DYKES! Don't TOUCH US! We'll HURT YOU!", eating fire at the rally afterward, having the Boys' Auxiliary bring us cookies they'd baked. Going to Seattle and seeing a Pride Parade there that took three hours to march by, including six-foot model vibrators from Toys in Babeland and the Queers With Corgis (accompanied by one non-matching dog wearing a sign that said "Spaniel But Not Narrow"). My first Pride in Iowa City, where the gay community was so small that everyone marched and no one was left over to sit on the curb and watch, and my stats professor was giving out cold drinks with PFLAG. Going to my first Baltimore Pride with friends, realizing that I should've thought out in advance how I would handle being greeted by clients at the parade.

I still think of Pride as my holiday, and it's kind of a jolt to go to Pride now and feel like such an outsider. I mean, you know, I'm there with my husband and kids. It's entirely reasonable for people's eyes to slide past me without that smile of fellowship. Still feels kind of weird, though.

I just came across a fascinating story about a Congregational (United Church of Christ) church in Connecticut which is beginning to go through the "Open and Affirming" process - a series of discussions, study, and exploration directed towards opening the church to be fully inclusive of GLBT people.

Just before Christmas, every member of the church received an anonymous letter offering a $50,000 donation to the church if the O&A process were abandoned.

From reading the link, it sounds as though the congregation as a whole has been ambivalent about becoming O&A. Apparently it's been a question that's been discussed and not accepted before, and some members are bringing forth Biblical objections.

That's why it's so awesome that, according to the senior minister:

The church leadership and staff were immediately inundated with calls, letters and emails. To my knowledge not a single message was received that said the church should consider accepting the proposal.

At the link, you can read the senior minister's full response - which includes a thoughtful analysis of Biblical arguments against homosexuality, as well as a general discussion of how the church should be guided on contentious issues. My favorite part is this:

I have written before about the church being a place where people can discuss issues of great importance to their communities and their own lives. I have been in churches where people are scared to talk about issues where there might be disagreement; to me, those are faith communities that are just going through the motions. When you read the book of Acts, you find that, from its very beginning, the church has been a tempestuous thing, involved in discussions about issues large and small. Part of discerning what the church is and where it is going is having the members share their insights with one another. It is how we educate and challenge one another. It is also where we discover how God is still speaking to each person. The idea of being paid to not talk about something is disturbing. It flies in the face of the whole idea of being a Congregational church where the true power and responsibility rests in the hands of the congregation.

I grew up in a Congregational church, and I remember how a poorly-run O&A process tore my congregation apart. (The process was renewed a few years later, and was fully successful then.) Ideally, of course, full inclusivity would be such a no-brainer that there would be no need for struggle or care in its implementation. But when that isn't where people are, I really respect them for being willing to put this much thoughtful work into the process.

I wanted to hold onto an exchange I'm participating in, in someone else's journal. (I will let that person decide whether to provide a link, because they might not want an influx of my friends piling on.)

( reposted gay marriage discussion )

Yesterday after work we went to the state capitol in Annapolis to lobby for GLBT rights with Equality Maryland. The two major issues on their agenda are marriage equality (particularly, defeating a proposed "Defense of Marriage" constitutional amendment) and adding transgendered people to the state anti-discrimination law. The crowd mostly seemed focused on the marriage issue, perhaps because Maryland has a right-to-marry lawsuit that has made it through the first round of the courts and gotten everyone fired up.





( more, including more pictures, below the cut )

A few weeks back, the Baltimore Sun published a long profile of a member of my church. I missed it when it first came out, but of course it was plastered all over the bulletin board in the Parish Hall, so I got to read it yesterday. It's inspiring.

On his first trip as a civil rights activist, Charles Blackburn already knew the rules: Disconnect the lights in your car so you're not an easy target for snipers. Drive down the center of the road to make it harder to be run off the side. Stick to the black neighborhoods whenever possible.

A white Unitarian minister, he was headed from his home in Huntsville, Ala., to McComb, Miss., where a string of bombings had devastated black homes and churches. It was October 1964. Nine white men arrested in the bombings had just been released.

"I knew what the violence was and that these people were out on the street," Blackburn says. But he made the lonely trip all the same, arriving at a bus station where he was met with a sea of white faces. "I knew what was in my heart, and I knew what I believed. And if they had known this, my life would have been worth very little to them."

He carried another secret in that bus station, and in his years fighting for civil rights in the South: He was gay. It was a secret he would keep for 10 more years, until 1974, when he separated from his wife and moved to Baltimore.

Now, four decades after risking his life in a civil rights struggle for others, Blackburn, 73, says it is time to fight for himself. Along with his partner of 28 years, Glen Dehn, he is a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to expand marriage to gay and lesbian couples in Maryland. Blackburn is a bridge between the two movements, a man with a creased face and thinning hair who knows what it means to stand up, and why it is essential.

I knew that Charles had been involved in the Civil Rights movement as a young minister in Huntsville, Alabama, but I didn't know how extensive his involvement was: jailed, threatened, church windows shot out. I know him as an elderly man who sings in the choir, makes stained glass, and keeps up an exquisite showpiece of a Victorian home. And of course, I know him as a genteel, dignified gay marriage activist. Our whole church is behind him.

Read the whole profile. You'll need bugmenot to get past the first page, but it's worth it. Really.

Our church just hired a new Director of Religious Education. Here's an excerpt from her introductory column in the monthly newsletter, with emphasis added by me:

[...] And change is what we have before us. For me: a new apartment, a new job, a new routine, and a new ocean to visit when time allows. For all of us: new adventures, new forms to fill out, new committee responsibilities, new ideas to imagine, and new friends to enrich our lives. It might be too much if it weren't for all the familiar comforts that help us meet new challenges. For me, that's my family: my two partners, Lyn and Uri, and our cats, Lucy and Splat. And, of course, Unitarian Universalism, a faith that welcomes us all into a thoughtful reverence for this sacred world while nurturing within us the fierce desire for building justice.

I will be working with the Children's Religious Education Committee, building on the work of previous years, to continue to create a safe, welcoming religious home for children and youth. [...]

I've already met her, and I thought she was really cool. And I've heard fabulous things about her from the RE Committee. But this? I did not expect. Whoa.

On Monday, curiousangel and I celebrated Valentine's Day by going to Annapolis for an Equality Maryland lobby day and rally in support of GLBT rights. It didn't work out quite the way we planned, but we had a good time anyway.

The schedule called for a 45-minute assembly and briefing followed by a 1-hour rally, after which we would split up into legislative districts and lobby our state senators and delegates. There's a "Defense of Marriage" bill that's introduced every year (and doesn't have much hope of passing), but there are also some bills before the legislature that could make a positive difference - such as the Medical Decision Making Act, a fairly well-thought-out bill which confers hospital visitation rights and medical decisionmaking powers on couples who register with the state as partners. Equality Maryland made appointments with legislators and provided bill summaries, voting records, and other supporting materials on their website. It was a well-planned action...

...until we arrived in Annapolis and saw, driving towards the center of town, that one of the traffic lights was out. We thought nothing of it until the next traffic light was out as well. Downtown Annapolis had no power. Including the hotel where we gathered for the briefing - although it did have an atrium, at least, so there was daylight in the main hall. (But not the bathrooms, each of which was eerily lit by a flashlight balanced on end.) There was no PA system. We spent most of the briefing hour milling around aimlessly, looking for members of our church and periodically asking if anyone else could hear the speaker. (No.)

We marched several blocks to the statehouse with about a dozen people from our church, behind a banner that said "Equal Rights in the Free State" and had the Unitarian-Universalists for Social Justice logo. It had been raining all day, but the rain slacked off to nothing as we left the hotel and held off until we were in the car again at the end of the day - a clear sign that God supports gay rights. But it was cold, and I was wearing nice clothes - a dress, in fact - in preparation for lobbying my legislators. Yes, this is foreshadowing.

The rally was great. Somehow they'd managed to get generators in on short notice, so the rally speakers were amplified. Alan Keyes' daughter, Maya Marcel-Keyes, gave a great speech about how the amount of support that poured in when her father kicked her out for being a lesbian wasn't at all the typical fate of gay teenagers rejected by their parents. She told a moving story about a friend from a similarly conservative family who wound up living on the streets, and recently died. A 14-year-old boy with lesbian parents talked about his family life and why he wanted his moms to be able to marry. Matthew Shepherd's mother spoke about the need for hate crimes legislation. We hung out in the cold and the mud, clapping and cheering, and curiousangel took turns helping to hold up the church banner using umbrellas as improvised poles. (We weren't allowed to have signs on sticks.) I was grateful that he had brought a lawn chair for me to sit in, because just the walk from the hotel to the statehouse wore me out.

As the rally drew to a close, we got bad news: the power still wasn't on in the legislative office buildings, and the fire marshal wasn't willing to let us into the building as long as only had emergency lights. Some people's legislators apparently did come out to meet briefly with their constituents in the square, but all the scheduled meetings were cancelled. We were disappointed. Our delegates had voted the Equality Maryland party line on all relevant bills, so we just would've gone by to say "thank you," but I still think that's an important thing to do.

So instead we headed back to the hotel, which now had power. We spent a few minutes at the reception - damn, you'd think that the Log Cabin Republicans could afford to provide better food - and then, once we'd warmed up enough to be able to feel our toes again, we went home. We were so worn out from the cold, and from several long walks in the wind, that curiousangel fell asleep in our Chinese restaurant while we were waiting for takeout. But I'm glad we went. And I saved a sticker from the rally - I DO in Maryland - for the Li'l Critter's baby book. Her first political action.

So I was in the locker room after my water aerobics class, getting dressed next to the instructor.

"Have any fun plans this weekend?" she asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Tomorrow we're having people over for a cookout, and then Sunday we're going to gay pride in D.C."

She followed up with: "Are you married?"

Huh.

I, personally, would not choose to respond to "We're going to gay pride" by asking "Are you married." It just wouldn't occur to me. What was she thinking? I can think of three possibilities:

(1) She had such extremely accurate gaydar that she correctly perceived me as bisexual. (I wasn't, for example, wearing my wedding ring.)

(2) She wasn't thinking - she was clueless. Maybe she wasn't listening, or maybe she didn't recognize the phrase "gay pride," or maybe she didn't stop to think about the normal audience at gay pride.

(3) She was in a state of homophobic panic brought on by being nekkid next to a queer person.

What do you think?

[Poll #306787]

Water aerobics, incidentally, is insanely fun. I had no idea that I would enjoy it that much. I came home in a lovely peaceful floaty endorphin haze, which unfortunately has now worn off to be replaced by sore muscles. But still: water aerobics is way fun.

I realized that I automatically expect to be the worst at any physical activity. There was another woman I spoke to in the locker room before class - this was her second time doing water aerobics. She was tall and slender and conventionally pretty, and I automatically assumed that, given that we were both beginners, she would be much better at it than I was. She wasn't. In fact, she had a lot of trouble figuring out how she was supposed to move, and I pretty much did okay.

The same thing happened when I learned to shoot, and when I started doing English Country Dance. I'm good at both of them, and I was fairly good at both - and a quick learner - from the beginning. But in my mental image of myself, I still expect to be hopeless at anything physical. I begin to suspect that I may not be uncoordinated and awkward after all - that my problems with physical activity may just be due to disability-related weakness, and not to any inherent klutziness.

It's a weird feeling.

"But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea." - Langland

I just posted this in response to someone who was proudly storing up Bible quotes she could use to "rebuke homosexuality:"

Here are some texts I highly recommend to your attention:

Matthew 7:1-5.

John 8:3-11.

When we look at what Christ calls us to do, the lessons he teaches are clear. It's not a very Christian thing to store up lists of texts that you can use to "rebuke" someone, and to chase after other people to tell them that they're sinful. That's not what Jesus taught his followers to do.

When the woman who was taken in adultery was brought before him, he didn't quote the relevant scriptures condemning adultery, did he? He wasn't on the side of the people who had eagerly sought out a sinner and condemned her - he told them to be more concerned with what they were doing wrong. When you seek out passages you can use to "rebuke homosexuality," are you being more like Jesus or more like the crowd he criticized in John 8?

And in Matthew 7: Christ tells you, explicitly, "Judge not, lest ye be judged...Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye?" How do you reconcile that text with your eagerness to prove that homosexuality is sinful? You have a long way to go before you'll be truly Christlike in your love, charity, humility, mercy, and goodness. We all do. But in your eagerness to tell gays and lesbians what they're doing wrong, you forget about how far you fall short of the glory of God.

Work on yourself. Work on showing so much love and charity towards others that they spontaneously want to be like you and share your faith. If you truly trust in God, then trust that God will know what to do about gays and lesbians. It's not your job to judge them - that job is reserved for God alone.

I'll pray for you in Christ's name, that you may develop Christlike charity of spirit.

Real Live Preacher said it better, but we can only work with what we're given, I guess.

minnaleigh and I went to the pride festival in DC today to leaflet for Howard Dean. We had two hundred half-sheet flyers emphasizing Dean's gay rights positions. They were gone in about fifteen minutes. I totally underestimated how many we'd need. Yay!