THE BATTLES CONTINUE, BUT THE WAR IS WON

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter

Yesterday’s column about my church voting to be a Reconciling Congregation set a record for readers, 742. I don’t check the blogger statistics page very often, but I’m pretty sure the high reader mark in the past was in the low 400s.

742 is not a very big number for real blog writers, but it is for an old man whose ostensible task is to reflect on how to be a Christian in your dotage, while actually just giving him an outlet for any musings that come into his jumbled brain. That high number, of course, was because of the subject. Full rights for LGBTQ people is a hot topic.

I have said for some time, though, that the LGBTQ topic is already cold, that the fight for full acceptance of gay people is over, because of kids like the teen-aged church friend I mentioned in yesterday’s CIW, for whom discrimination against gay folks just doesn’t make sense.

Also, as more and more gay people have “come out,” almost everybody knows someone who is gay, and it’s not easy to discriminate against folks you know and like.

I remember my theology professor, Philip Watson, using the battle of El Alamein to illustrate the victory of Christ on the cross. It was just one battle in the whole of World War II, but it was at that point the war was won by the Allies. There was a lot more war to follow, because the Axis powers did not know yet that they had lost. Looking back, though, it was clear at El Alamein that although the battles were still going on, the war had been won.

So it is, I think, with the battle for full acceptance of gay folks. That conflict is still going on, but victory is assured, because young people have decided it makes no sense to discriminate against LGBTQ people. As noted in the CIW for August 22, a common characteristic of Generation Y is that they don’t like meanness, and it’s mean to discriminate against people for things they can’t control, like gender and race.  

There will still be resistance to full rights, like marriage, for gay folks. There is still a lot of bullying of teen gays, a lot of rejection of gay family members.

It is like the battle for full acceptance of black folks. The battle for full rights for black people was won in the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, fifty years ago. But there is still a strong and virulent strain of racism in this country, a lot of people who want to turn back the clock and put black folks back “in their place.”

There is still conflict. People who don’t want women or blacks or gays or Muslims or… to have a full place at the table, who want them to stay in the kitchen. Lots of skirmishes still to be fought, but the war for justice has been won.

I think our real problem was electing a president whose only point for discrimination was blackness. We should have just elected a black lesbian nun named Stein from Mississippi and dealt with all the prejudices at once.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.