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June is Pride Month

Dear Friends in Faith,

In this edition of the St Paul’s Newsletter is a brochure for the Pride and Progress Picnic to be held on June 25, 2023, at Veterans Park in Greenville from 2 to 6 p.m.
Pride marches, events, and festivals began in Chicago on Saturday, June 27, 1970. Other marches were held in San Francisco on the 27th and in Los Angeles and New York City on the 28th. The events were intended to raise awareness of the rights of the LGBTQ community and were timed to commemorate an early morning police raid on June 28, 1969, of a gay bar at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A Wikipedia article on the Stonewall Riots describes the importance of the raid to the gay community in this way: “While police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960’s, officers quickly lost control of the situation at the Stonewall Inn…Patrons of the Stonewall Inn, other Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighborhood street people fought back when the police became violent. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States.”
Over the last 50+ years, much has been accomplished to secure the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. But just the recent increase in state legislations barring medical care for transgender youth make it clear that negative biases, misinformation, scape-goating, and physical, mental, and emotional abuse are still very much a reality for LGBTQ+ persons.
As Christians and co-workers with Christ, what can we do to be “ministers of reconciliation”?
For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation. The old order has passed away; now everything is new! All of this is from God, who ransomed us through Christ—and made us ministers of that reconciliation. (2 Corinthians 5:17-18)
What can we do? Well, the first thing we can do is educate ourselves. Here’s a suggestion…
June is Pride Month and this year the Story Corps blog is “sharing stories from LGBTQ people finding peace and acceptance with themselves, their families, and the people they love—and sometimes making history in the process.”

Check it out at https://storycorps.org/
And we can do the reflective work of self-examining our own prejudices and negative biases…and we all have them!
But more importantly, we can stand with members of the LGBTQ+ community, and as we are called and able, work with the community to guarantee rights and protections under the law, and secure safe havens of inclusion and understanding and acceptance, particularly within our St Paul’s Episcopal worshiping community.
And, to that end, the Pride and Progress Picnic on June 28th from 2-6 at Veterans Park in Greenville would be a good place to begin. I plan to be there. I hope you will too.

   

David L. Vickers +