My congregation received a letter from the Unitarian Universalist Association last week officially recognizing us as a Welcoming Congregation.

Letter from the BGLT Concerns Office
Dear Pathways Church,

It is with great pleasure that I inform you that your congregation may be recognized officially as a Welcoming Congregation.

Our history shows that the liberal religious tradition is affirmed every time another congregation commits itself to being a human place that affirms, welcomes, and celebrates the presence of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender persons. Though there remains a great deal of work to do in the Association before homophobia and transphobia become things of the past, it is congregations like yours that serve as an inspiration for those who have yet to begin the work of greater inclusion and understanding.

We are also sending you two posters, suitable for framing, that read “We are a Welcoming Congregation: This Unitarian Universalist community welcomes and celebrates the presence and participation of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and/or transgender people.”

Congratulations, and thanks! Sincerely,

Rev. Keith Kron, Directorog GLBT Concerns

This letter arrived during election week; during the week America elected its first black president and the week CA voted to actually take away rights from its gay citizens.  Our president-elect’s parents could not have been legally married in many states when he was born because interracial marriage was illegal at the time he was born in many states then.  It took a Supreme Court decision to change that.  That decision re-defined marriage.  I think it is going to take another Supreme Court decision to end this madness that treats some of our fellow citizens as lesser human beings. Fittingly, the election of the 44th president will most likely allow a court majority open-minded enough, sensible enough to understand that everyone is equal before the law or our claim as a nation that every person is created equal is meaningless.  I’m wondering if it will take mass action to get us there or if we are past that and what we need is the type of ground game that fueled the Obama campaign combined with the type of lobbying that made the equal marriage campaign successful in Massachusetts –   Peppering every state legislature in the country with constant citizen lobbying efforts of GLBT citizens and allies and every federal legislative office with the same. And then a test case in every state, so that the courts are overwhelmed. Eventually, one is going to have to be heard by the SCOTUS.

Strange but that blog post headline seems like it belongs in the 1950s, except for one thing.  The black man was running for office. Except the black man was running for President. Except for the fact that he WON.  Hate dies a slow, painful, tortured death as pain and agony are all it knows. Most people and most things die the way they live. Still it’s disturbing and I’m on edge waiting for the white hoods to make a final appearance before it’s all said and done. The news in the local morning paper just has me shaking my head today.

This is frightening, but it’s just the appetizer: In Fort Worth, Obama’s Election prompts run on guns and ammunition

Allan Craig is scared for the country and for himself.

So less than 48 hours after Democrat Barack Obama was elected president, Craig went out to buy an M-4 rifle.

“It’s for protection,” the 57-year-old funeral director from Weatherford said. “I’m fearful for our country. I think there will be violence. People want to go in and take over this country .?.?. trying to destroy America.

“I will protect myself and my family.”

I’m scared of people like this guy. Yes, there will be violence – from people who react to the election of our first black President buy running out to buy guns and bullets.  How do I protect my family from people like this?  Is there any protection from our neighbors who react to change and difference and diversity by arming themselves more heavily?  Tuesday night wasn’t the end, it was just the beginning. There is more work to do.

The main course was this: Area Schools deal with Racist Comments, Actions

Students at Colleyville Middle School used a social networking site to urge one another to wear black in protest of Obama’s victory, according to the parents of different students.

If it happened, campus administrators didn’t notice, Grapevine-Colleyville school district spokeswoman Megan Overman said. “There wasn’t anything organized, as far as we could tell,” she said.

There were hallway chants and untoward comments at a few Grapevine-Colleyville schools, including Colleyville Middle, since the election, but “those incidents have been handled,” Overman said.

The district has a character education program that focuses on civility, and the issues will also be discussed in some history classes, she said.

“We’re trying to turn this into learning opportunities,” Overman said. “Only every four years do we get a chance to talk about elections, and elections this historic are obviously much more rare.”

It seems like the character education program at this school isn’t very effective. Yes, Ms. Overman you only get to talk about elections every four years, but you get to do anti-racism/anti oppression education every day. If the Grapevine-Colleyville schools took these issues seriously and engaged them with students and parents would students get to middle school age and engage in this type of behavior? Possibly, you can’t stop everything, but a systemic anti racism education program that begins in the earliest years of schooling would leave middle schooler far less likely to engage in such behavior.

What we need now is reconciliation on a mass scale.  There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people who are living in fear that in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election results there will be a mass revenge-taking, a mass table-turning.  I am getting the sense that racists feel like white South Africans after apartheid.  Perhaps our response needs to be as measured as was South Africa’s.  As justified as oppressed black South Africa might have been to turn the tables on their white oppressors at apartheid’s end, they did not.  They opted for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission instead.

There is a seismic shift going on among the political and social forces that have control of American public life for the last 28 years. Rev. Osagyefo Ushur Sekou writes, “Consider that for some years now one has been able to interchange the words ‘Christian’, ‘conservative’, ‘religious’, ‘right’, and ‘Republican’ in one sentence without necessarily changing the meaning of the sentence” (“Who’ God? Faith, Democracy and Making of an Authentic Religious Left” in Dispatches from the Religious Left pg. 64)  That dynamic is itself changing and came to a head Tuesday night. Those for whom this reality is a good thing are ready to move ahead into a new, more civil, more inclusive century.  Those for whom that old paradigm was a good thing are shaken to their bones. Some do not know how to handle it and are just plain scared, terrified.  From and out of that fear, they will act.  Hatred is making its stand against gay rights, racism is popping up in reaction to election results and what had been good manners have been lost as racist jokes become a way to identify as “us” against “them” in the new tolerant and welcoming world order.

Good morning America, how are you?

Don’t you know me? I’m your native son.

It’s morning in America and the sky is blue.  A polarized nation placed it’s soul in the hands of black man from Illinois over the last two years and last night he delivered on the first part of the promise – that America could bridge the divides that once would have prevented his very election.

Part of the reason Barack Obama is the President-elect of the United States today is that he’s a preacher.  He understands both the practical and the pastoral need to bridge ideological divides, calling for an end to red states and blue states and recalling us to be United States.  His speeches such as the Yes We Can sequence, first debuted after the New Hampshire primary use a historical pride sequence, wrapped equally in our social justice and civil rights landmarks and our civil religion of founding fathers and military honors.  He has pulpit presence and it makes a difference.  Being called to be our best selves is not reserved for Sunday morning or Saturday or Friday. And in a nation where our leaders, even our President have been examples of our worst selves, lying and manipulating us into war, torturing enemies, spying, spreading attitudes of xenophobia and using fear as a weapon of social and political control, being called to a higher purpose resonated.  Barack Obama never had to say, “Americans are not liars, torturers, racists, bigots, spies,etc.”  He didn’t have to. Instead he reminded us what we are and we can do. It was a compelling call and many came to the altar, hoping against hope their fellow citizens would follow; hoping against hope that you, in your isolation weren’t the only one tired to the bone of a long national nightmare.

Every time it seemed the usual forces of fear and hate and cynicism would beat down Obama, he rose to the occasion and delivered yet another sermon.  (UPDATE - President-elect Obama’s prepared election eve remarks.)

2008 was the seventh time I’ve voted in a presidential election and he’s only the second winner I’ve ever voted for (Bill Clinton being the first).   I was so happy, I cried during his speech at Grant Park.  It was joy, but it was also relief.  Eight years of deceit, lies, spying, and eroding the freedoms and values upon which our country is founded are finally over.  Yet, it’s not the end, it’s just the beginning of solving the problems created by the worst presidential administration ever.

But this new President-Elect and his campaign have always been about hope. And hope is not an empty thing. It’s kept many of us going for going on eight years now.

Hope, as Andy told Red at Shawshank prison, “iis a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”  And hope is not going away now. It will be a central theme for Obama going forward as he forges the coalition he needs to move his agenda.

Two little black girls will spend childhood in the White House comes a pundit voice from the TV behind me.  Finally, the America that never was but could be is finally starting to become real in astoundingly profound ways.  I’m so glad I’m on the train.

I will provide for you
And I’ll stand by your side
You’ll need a good companion for
This part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there’ll be sunshine
And all this darkness past

Big wheels roll through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

Thanks once again to my friends Eric at Life is a Mystery and Mary at Tensegrities for making me aware of a video showing the Boss preaching for the hope of the future.Here you have the most highly paid theologian in America, Bruce Springsteen, singing as he does so well about those aren’t so well paid.  The Boss certainly makes well over $250,000 a year and will be paying substainially more income taxes come the dawn of an Obama presidency, and yet here he is in Cleveland, OH singing his song Youngstown, about the folks who work the mills there and make substaintially less than $250,000 a year.

The Boss singing about Youngstown, Ohio from Rick Pollack on Vimeo.

The rich only taking care of the rich doesn’t work.  Joe the Steel Worker is going to be much better off backing Obama:

Seven-hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name.

Because this is the world that trickle down and deregulation have brought us.  A world run by those who parade an arch religious conservative as a Vice Presidential candidate but who as the Biblical prophet Amos says, “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals,  who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way.”

Here’s the complete lyric:

Here in north east Ohio
Back in eighteen-o-three
James and Danny Heaton
Found the ore that was linin’ yellow creek
They built a blast furnace
Here along the shore
And they made the cannon balls
That helped the union win the war

Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown

Well my daddy worked the furnaces
Kept ‘em hotter than hell
I come home from ‘Nam worked my way to scarfer
A job that’d suit the devil as well
Taconite, coke and limestone
Fed my children and made my pay
Then smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of god
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay

Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown

Well my daddy come on the 0hio works
When he come home from world war two
Now the yards just scrap and rubble
He said, “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”
These mills they built the tanks and bombs
That won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for

Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown

From the Monongaleh valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalacchia
The story’s always the same
Seven-hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

In Youngstown
In Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown

When I die I don’t want no part of heaven
I would not do heavens work well
I pray the devil comes and takes me
To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell