(cross-posted from my private blog, sent to my friends in North Carolina)
So, this is my return to blogging after a few years in the lurch. I think this is worth writing about.
As I was going through High School, some of my most profound experiences (in music and life) came with the wonderful people at The Cathedral of All Souls in Biltmore Village. I worked with most of the people who turned me into a serious musician there, but more than that, I found a home, a family outside my (loving, caring) nuclear family. I will freely admit that there are plenty of things about mainstream Christianity that frustrate, confuse, and discourage me. And yet, at All Souls, I found a group of people who were Christians with a strong sense of social justice and a strong commitment to praxis (a term that gained this context in the social justice movements in the Latin American Catholic Church, and can be briefly summed up as meaning a commitment to doing good works in the world, not just preaching them).
Nowhere was this more evident than the loving relationship between two folks at my church. They had come through the Vietnam War together as military doctors and had lived for the past fifty years in Asheville. I met one of the two near the end of his life, although I didn’t know it yet. I was a young kid, and so the words “carcinogen” and “hospice” didn’t mean a whole lot to me until one day, at choir practice, the person next to me simply wasn’t there, and I had to come to terms with the fact that the baritone sitting next to me was no longer there.
(past the jump for more)
I got to know his partner quite well over the next few years, and talked to him several times about the love of his life and the life they led together. It was never a question of gay, straight, legal, immoral, any of that. It was a question of love: the love that these two men had shared for so many years, and the love that the one who survived has for the one that passed away to this very day. It didn’t, and doesn’t, need to mean any more than that.
Folks are folks. We in this country are so eager to find the “other,” that person or group of people whose views differ from our own on some more or less intrinsic level, everything from the color of our skin to the letter on our voter registration card. There are a thousand things that contribute to this need to define the “other,” but we as human beings are always at our strongest and our best when we recognize that we are much, much more alike than we ever could be different. We as human beings are at our best when we promote the best inclinations of our nature, to love and cherish those around us, and to see the best in all people. And, as my friends at All Souls would put it, we as human beings are at our best when we base our dealings with others on the very simple command to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” that from which our whole system of social contract stems.
If we as a state decide that we need to trample the rights of some, we are not protecting the sanctity of anything. We are relegating ourselves to the dustbin of history with racism, sexism, and social darwinism. If we as a state decide that we get to reward (financially and socially) the love of some and not recognize the love of others, we are diminishing the sanctity of all.
So, for all of my friends in North Carolina, I have a simple, two-part request:
1 – Vote on May 8th, and if you can find it in your heart to recognize that people are just people and that everyone deserves the same rights, vote No on Amendment One and consign that kind of bigotry to the history books, not our State Constitution.
2 – If you plan to vote against the Amendment, ask yourself why, and tell your story. Tell the world why it is that you want to stand up for the rights of all, and I hope that in the process, we (together) will bring this world to a better place, one small but loving step at a time.