When Tel Aviv city councilman Itai Pinkas was in Amsterdam last year, he stared for a long time at the monument honoring homosexuals killed in the Holocaust, sensing its impact was going to stay with him for a long time.
When he got back to Tel Aviv, he took that powerful feeling and raced straight to Mayor Ron Huldai’s office to talk.
Now, Pinkas and Huldai have revealed the outcome of the meeting: Tel Aviv is going to be home to the country’s first memorial to gay victims of Nazi persecution. The public sculpture is slated to go up in the centrally located Gan Meir by midwinter.
According to the article, Tel Aviv will soon open what is thought to be the first LGBT community center in the world to be financed and run by the local government. The mayor’s comments touched me:
The gay community in Tel Aviv is very significant in numbers and contributions to the city’s cultural life and economy, and there is no reason why the local government should not give necessary services crucial to these citizens. Also, some people have bad experience sharing their being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and others are understandably afraid to do so, so this place will be an open and safe haven for them.
I’ve been reading The Two Aunties blog for several weeks now. Sarah and Kay are a married trans couple living in the southeast who have continued to be active in their small Episcopal church through transition and beyond. This morning Sarah wrote about her experience in worship yesterday:
As the only transgender person of our small church, I was greatly saddened at this morning’s service. We are a small church in number, but as the service started only 4 people were in the seats; not counting the altar party and those who were sitting in the choir.
Many of us can relate to the kind of discouragement a person feels on a Sunday like that. But imagine how much worse it would be if you thought it was all your fault. Sarah continues:
I have developed a strong bond with my church and to most of the people who attend, and when attendance is down I am too quick to . . . think those who I expect to show up wanted to stay away because of me. My strong love for my church was one of the last road blocks, if you like, which held me back in revealing my being trans. The one reason that I waited so long, was my fear that by revealing my true self, that would cause people to react by point fingers at me if the church were to crumble where it stood. Being the person who causes a church’s demise was the last thing I wanted on my head.
Reading Sarah’s fears brought me back to my early years in ministry. I was pastoring a small Baptist congregation overseas that had been teetering on the edge of collapse for some time before they called me, and I felt myself to be in many ways the last, best hope for renewal for this once thriving church. I evaluated every decision I made, every sermon I preached, every pastoral action I undertook by the attendance at our worship services. When lots of people showed up, I felt affirmed. When only a few came, I doubted. And on those dark days when my family and I were the only ones there, I despaired.
Then one day I realized that my own choices had much less to do with the size of our congregation than I had previously believed. I can’t pinpoint what led me to that realization, but I’m sure it was connected to learning the following:
People make their own choices about where and when to worship.
I am not responsible for those choices.
I am responsible for my own choices.
My responsibility for my choices is to God, not to the congregation.
To carry out my ministry with integrity, I must resist the temptation to take responsibility for the choices of others.
Sarah, you are not responsible for what has happened to your beloved church. If some have left the church because of your presence there, they did so because they chose to. You are not responsible for their choices; they are. You are responsible only for your own choice to live with integrity among the people of God you have loved. And you are not responsible to them; you are responsible to God.
There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it’s now OK to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly until it’s simply the way things are.
Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Madison, Wisconsin), the first openly gay non-incumbant elected to Congress, in an interview with the Detriot News
This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end each program by saying, “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are.”
Fred Rogers (1928-2003), children’s television pioneer and Presbyterian minister
And a comment from me: Today would have been Fred Rogers’ 80th birthday. I loved Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as a child and miss his influence on the world of children as a parent today. His message of loving affirmation blesses me even now, inspiring and challenging me to make sure the people around me–my children especially–know that they are beloved of God. To get a dose of inspiration from Mr. Rogers, check out his Wikipedia entry and his entry at Wikiquote. His was truly a life well lived, and he is one of my heroes. Thank you so much, Mister Rogers, for teaching me so much about what love is. (Thanks to The Writers Almanac.)
I hope you’ll set aside a few minutes to watch this video, highlighting the five murders and one suicide of gender-variant people that received media attention in February of this year. How many victims must there be before it becomes an epidemic?
PhD. candidate and Point Scholar Joelle Ruby Ryan created the piece. In a companion essay (available at this point only as a Word document), she writes,
The tyranny of gender rigidity has a death grip on our culture. And this system is not merely theoretical; it has very real casualties. One of the things which troubles me the most is how few non-transgender people get involved in the fight for change. How many transgender people have to die before you will get involved? How many gender-variant youth will be brutally murdered or will commit suicide because they see no hope for a livable future for themselves, let alone a happy one?
I recognize and respect that many conservative Christians believe the binary gender system to be God-ordained and biblically endorsed. I cannot believe, however, that any of them would endorse murder or suicide as justifiable means for protecting, enforcing, or advancing that system. And yet those who speak for conservative Christians in America are largely silent on the matter of these deaths.
To those who are prone to these kinds of violent acts, that silence implies that violence is indeed justified. To the young straight man who has discovered that a gay classmate has a crush on him, the church’s silence says, “It’s okay to rough him up a little.” To a twelve year old boy who has known all his short life that he needs to be a girl, the church’s silence says, “We’ll all be better off if you’d just put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.” To the parents of a teenage girl who refuses to stop seeing her girlfriend, the church’s silence says, “Of course you’re justified in kicking her out of the house and onto the street.” When the voice of moral authority refuses to speak, hatred and injustice hear all the permission they need to hear.
For conservative Christian teachers, preachers, and leaders, speaking out against this kind of violence is risky. Some in your congregation will wonder if your views on homosexuality have softened. They’ll question your convictions against offering equal marriage rights to gays and lesbians. There will be talk in the corners of the fellowship hall and around kitchen tables about whether you’re falling prey to the “Homosexual Agenda.” Deacons might start receiving worried phone calls from influential church members. Some members will confront you to your face. Some will trust you less. Some will start looking for another church. The most hardened congregations will eventually suggest that maybe it’s time for you to move on, or will call for a vote to vacate the pulpit.
I recognize these risks. I’ve faced them myself. But I ask you, since when has preaching truth and justice been a risk-free proposition? And I ask you, how much risk are you willing to take? And I ask you, do gender-variant or questioning young people qualify as “the least of these” from Matthew 25?
And I remind you, as our Lord has said and will say again, “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”
It makes me wonder: if we can’t sit around a table and study the Bible together, what kind of communion do we have and what are we trying to save?
Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire and the Anglican communion’s only out gay bishop, on being formally excluded from the upcoming once-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops at Lambeth
