I am trying to find words to express my sadness and outrage at the loss of our beautiful friend Katya De La Riva who was much much much too young to die. There is no reason for her death other than the obstacles she faced made it so much more difficult for her to achieve health in a world that rejects and segregates transgender women. No one so young or vibrant should die from pneumonia. This should not be. And you can tell me this was not because of transphobia, it was because she became ill and sometimes people become ill and die. And I will tell you that she should not have died and the factors of transphobia, oppression and inequity in all things, led to her death. I am even angrier today after spending hours with a bunch of school district leaders trying to understand why there is any hesitancy at all to do everything possible to make their schools safe and supportive places where all children thrive. I am angry at having to go around and under, and work harder, and go through hoops, and find acceptable language and develop gentle ways to win hearts and minds. Enough. Enough. Enough. Anyone who is not risking offense, or who continues to not only sit idly by, but who falsely participates in a process of change under cover of doing things within a system, is a tool of the man and is to blame. For the death of Katya, the murder of Zoraida, and the suicide of Leelah. And I am trying to find some way to express this and having seen Selma the other night I sought out a master. MLK 1964 Lincoln, Nebraska All Im saying is simply this: that all life is interrelated, and in a real sense we are all courting an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And he goes on toward the end to say: Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.¹ It seems to me that a recognition of this is a basic responsibility that we, as Christians, face in the midst of the social changes that are taking place in our world. Let me say secondly, that we have a Christian responsibility, in this racial crisis, in this revolution, to reaffirm the essential immorality of racial segregation. Now over the last few years, we have had many important legal battles, and all of these battles of been for the purpose of establishing the constitutionality of integration and the unconstitutionality of segregation. It was very important to have these legal battles; very important to have the Supreme court standing up in 1954 saying, “that separate facilities are inherently unequal” -- that the old Plessy doctrine of 1896 must go, and that to segregate a child on the basis of his race is to not -- to deny that child equal protection of the law. This was important and it remains important. But we, as Christians, must come to see not only the unconstitutionality of segregation, but we must reaffirm over and over again that racial segregation is sinful and immoral, whether it’s in the public schools, whether it’s in housing, whether it is in the Christian church, or any other area of life. Segregation is morally wrong and sinful. Segregation is evil, to use the words of the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, because it substitutes an I-It relationship for the I-Thou relationship. To use the thinking of Saint Thomas Aquinas, segregation is evil because it is based on human laws that are out of harmony with the moral, natural, and eternal laws of the universe. Somewhere the great theologian Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. What is segregation but an existential expression of mans tragic estrangement -- his awful sinfulness, his tragic separation. And every Christian must see this, and see that segregation in any form is a cancer in the body politic of our nation which must be removed before our democratic and moral health can be realized. We must set out to get rid of segregation all over America -- now, henceforth, and forevermore. This is the challenge facing every Christian.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 06:18:41 +0000
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