Yesterday, Valentine’s Day, an event happened that not many of you may be aware of. Unitarian Universalist churches all across the country stood up for equal rights for members of the LGBT community. The campaign is known as Standing on the Side of Love.
Even Unitarians in the United State of Mormon Utah proclaimed their allegiance to a higher ideal of justice for all people, in opposition to the dominant faith of that state which works so diligently (and spends so much money) to defeat gay marriage across the USA.
Members and friends of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ogden seemed to get one step closer Sunday to their dream of ending discrimination against people who are gay or transgender.
At a Valentine’s Day town hall-style meeting at the church, they were encouraged by a city lawmaker and a statewide lobbyist to use all means available to get their voices heard.
“If you can do the job and pay the rent, it shouldn’t matter if you are gay or transgender,” Brandie Balkin, executive director of Equality Utah, said in introducing participants to the arguments that would be presented at the meeting.
Of course, the Ogden Unitarians were not alone. Even in Uganda, the country that has become the focus of so much attention because of its proposed laws to sentence homosexuals to death or life in prison, and to imprison those who support LGBT people, the Unitarians held a meeting to proclaim their campaign to resist this horrid anti-gay law currently pending in Uganda’s Parliament (the same bill that many fundamentalist Christian groups including the infamous Family have promoted behind the scenes). Sadly, threats of violence from anti-gay protesters forced them to meet in secret:
Activists assembled by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kampala met secretly in Uganda on Sunday to launch their campaign against the antigay bill pending in parliament.
According to the Uganda newspaper The Monitor, “The Unitarian Universalist Church of Kampala, one of the few religious organizations in Uganda that is supporting the gay community, held a conference on Sunday to ‘highlight the need for an end to discriminatory treatment of the gay population in Uganda.” […]
Participants were scheduled to include the Rev. Marlin Lavanhar … minister of the partner church, All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Rev. Patricia Ackerman, BGLT advocacy Ddirector for the UU-United Nations Office. Religious leaders from Uganda and as far away as France also were expected.
Imagine the courage that took. Here in this country, we who face far less danger for professing our view that all people should be allowed the same rights, even if their sexual orientation is not heterosexual need to do more. We need to show up at the public meetings of our city councils, and at town hall meetings held by our state and federal representatives, and at other public events to demand that our politicians live up to the ideal of equality and justice for all. We need to call the offices of those politicians and let them know we believe they haven’t done enough to provide the same rights to LGBT people which the rest of us take for granted.
I hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day with your spouse, fiance, girlfriend, boyfriend or partner. But please remember that we still live in a country that only recently passed a federal hate crimes law that includes gay and lesbians, and in much of the country there are no laws to protect LGBT people from discrimination in their employment or housing. In many states LGBT individuals and couples cannot adopt children and as we well know, devoted LGBT partners desiring marriage have few states where that right is recognized.
This isn’t an political issue, it’s a human rights issue, one that progressives, libertarians, Republicans who are gay or have gay family members, and people who simply believe that the denial of civil rights for even one person is a threat to the civil rights of all should support.
So, let us all commit ourselves to changing this injustice in our lifetime. Starting today.
