Smart people saying smart things (8.17)

Arthur Chu, “Men Without a Country: Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, My Father and Me”

I am done making excuses for this country, to say that “America” isn’t like that despite what the American government is like, despite what American history is like, despite what even now an overwhelming number of the American people are openly and proudly like. I am dead tired of pretending that countless examples are all exceptions, that to see a pattern where a pattern clearly exists is to be a “reverse racist” and “paranoid” and all the things I have accused my father of being.

Stacie @ GirlGriot, “Unseen, Unheard, Unvalued, Unimportant …”

A group of black teenagers walked up and one asked if I knew the man. I said I didn’t, and they immediately stepped between us got him off me and away from me, formed a shield between him and me. They tended me — was I okay, had he hurt me, what did I want to do, did I want them to travel with me. The man ran and two of the boys were going to go after him, but I stopped them. I wasn’t going to be the reason for someone misinterpreting the sight of two young black men chasing a white man down the street. More things I shouldn’t have to worry about. But do.

The boys — because really, they were babies, maybe 15-17 years old — walked me to the subway and were ready to throw off whatever their plans for the afternoon had been to see me safely wherever I was going, but I said no. Those boys were beautiful and fine and exactly the kind of men you want every man to be. And I thank all of the people who raised and shaped them. And I didn’t mind at all that they called me “ma’am.” I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t been coming up the block.

David Badash, “LGBT Americans Are ‘Significantly Less Religious’ Says Gallup — Here’s Why”

It’s no wonder that LGBT people are less religious, when daily the LGBT community is lambasted as perverted, sick, sinners, of the devil, and “worthy of death.” It’s no wonder that LGBT people are less religious, when those who claim to represent God and religion call for the mass murder of the world’s homosexuals.

Gays are regularly treated them as inhuman by most of the religious right’s loudest voices. Those same voices, along with the majority of GOP politicians — who are often one in the same — attack LGBT people as “perverted,” “degenerate,” “spiritually darkened” and “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.” They often engage in verbal assaults, like claiming homosexuality is an “unhealthy, sexual addiction,” an “abomination in the sight of God,” that same-sex marriage leads to “Adam and a bull,” and almost daily compare LGBT people to alcoholics, child-molesters, and thieves, and claim same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy, incest, increase in disease, and general immorality. And they call coming out as LGBT a “tragedy,” and a “family crisis.”

Kevin Carnahan, “Christian Favoritism in a Time of Persecution”

So, today as my fellow Christians call for support for Iraqi Church members, I pray that they also advocate for the Yazidis, the Shi’a, the Kurds, and the many others who suffer under the tyranny of the rogue militants who call themselves ISIS. And I pray that in the future we shed as much light on every instance of persecution, no matter who is suffering, as we are shedding on these occurrences. It is the World that Christ came to save, and as the body of Christ we must live in and for the World. Only to that extent will we never be of the World.

The Rev. Victoria Weinstein, “This Sunday, August 17”

Preach the news. Preach the fire. Preach the rage, the sadness, the lamentation. Preach it fierce. Bring your rage, your solidarity, your authority to confront: to confront ourselves, to confront our God, to confront yourself, to confront our sick, sick society. Confront what is really happening. Do not “spiritualize.” Do not offer bromides, cliches, or a load of Christian crap that everyone has heard before and that you yourself have heard too many times coming out of your own mouth because it feels easier to say that crap than to cover yourself in sackcloth and ashes and wail that you have no idea what God is doing, but that you only hope God is working in this, is in the suffering, is loving us still, will not abandon and forsake us.