Journey Toward Wholeness: Exploring Our Diversity
Comments by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale and Emily Ricketts
January 18, 2004
Susan's Comments:
Last Thursday, about a hundred and fifty people gathered around the front of IBT's bar on Fourth Avenue to hold a vigil for Mark Fontes. Mark had been found in the early morning hours Tuesday, crouched in an alley behind the bar, bleeding from the back of his head where someone had beaten him. He has been at University Medical Center ever since, in critical condition, unable to respond more than to flutter his eyes or squeeze a hand. Whoever beat him is still walking around, and that person's motive for doing such violence is unknown, except that IBT's is a gay bar, and Mark Fontes is gay.
Darcey and Pat were there, and Dick and Caroline, and Curtiss and me. Others from our congregation may have been there; there were so many people we couldn't even get close enough to hear the speakers. Others were there in heart, unable to attend due to other duties, or who didn't hear about it in time. The organizers from Wingspan passed out papers for us to write notes to Mark, and I wrote one on behalf of our congregation, sending him our hopes for healing, and letting him know we were working hard for a better world where everyone is accepted as they are.
Just before I arrived at the vigil, I had parked my car on the opposite side of the block from the bar, and I was walking along fourth street, when I heard and saw a black man and a white woman, both dressed in army fatigues, arguing with each other. The woman screamed at the man: "Heterosexual love is legal! Homosexual love is against the law! You facist, black #*# man!" Then she turned and crossed the street away from me and I cautiously approached the man who had turned toward me to continue his journey.
It didn't occur to me until later that they may have been a couple, both dressed in fatigues and carrying knapsacks like the homeless, yelling in a drug haze or psychotic haze. The tensions raised by the beating of Mark Fontes are palpable on Fourth Avenue. The same place where Wingspan and Eon are centered, our support organizations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning adults and youth. The same place my daughter went Friday night to hang out with her gay and straight friends at Eon. I said, "Only go out in groups of three or more!" Yes, Mom, she said. "You be careful!" I said. Yes, Mom, she said. I think I'm crazy for letting her go down there.
Prejudice isn't confined to that part of town, unfortunately. That would make things really easy. Maybe. But prejudice lives everywhere and in everyone, to some degree or other. We can't help the things we've picked up from our families and friends and society and religious organizations. All we can do is work on them, like I promised Mark Fontes we would do.
No, prejudice is not just on Fourth Avenue, walking the streets at night and threatening our children. Prejudice walks the halls of government in a big way. A state senator named Jack Harper is proposing a provision in the state constitution that would limit marriage to a man and a woman. It would also prevent the courts from letting unmarried couples benefit from the privileges that married couples have. Even as we seem to be making headway in opening up peoples' minds and hearts and laws to those who are oppressed in our society, there will always be those who want to retie the nooses and label love as evil if it is not love the way they believe it should look or behave.
Thursday, the night of the vigil, was also Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, birthday. Tomorrow, some of you will march in the morning. I won't be there, since we're driving to Phoenix for Curtiss' birthday to see Nana and his family. Rather than go to Phoenix with us, Kat wants to do the march, so she'll find a ride today with someone. We all do what we can when we can: march, vigil, speak out, support, write letters. Whatever we can do, we should do.
I was looking for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, "I Have a Dream" speech which I know is on my shelf, but instead, I found this pamphlet from the 1966 UUA General Assembly, when King delivered the Ware Lecture. My parents must have been there and saved it. It's the text of his speech, with pencil markings where my father noted places to quote King in his own sermons. My father underlined these words from the end of King's speech:
Let me say in conclusion that I have not despaired of the future….We can sing We Shall Oveercome, because somehow we know the dark of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome, because Carlyle is right -- "no lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right -- "Truth crushed to earth will rise again."… With…faith…we will be able tole to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood, and speed up that day when all of God's children all over our nation and the world will be able to walk the earth as brothers and sisters, and then we can sing the words of the old Negro spiritual -- "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last."
We've been reading King's words for almost forty years now. We've been dreaming his dream for forty years: that our children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Children, anyone, should not be judged by their looks or by the gender of their lover or by their disabilities in society, but by who they are inside and how they behave outside. Truthfulness, integrity, compassion, respect, justice; those should be the measure of a person. And love should be the highest value of all. Let us celebrate our differences by taking hands, and journeying toward wholeness together. I do believe that we shall overcome. Someday!
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson