Counterpoints
A couple weeks ago, May 25, 2025, was the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American Unitarian Association–one of the precursor organizations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, of which this congregation is a member. It was also the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association–a precursor of the current day General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches. Neither the American Unitarians nor the British Unitarians knew that the other body was organizing itself on that specific day.
I don’t believe there is a supreme intelligence in the universe pulling on the strings of human affairs, one that caused the Brits and the Americans to synchronize the founding of their organizations. I do believe that the time comes for ideas and beliefs to move into the forefront of society, for the genesis of structures to support and transmit ideas and beliefs long marginalized by happenstance or choice, and that the ponderous pace of communication between continents in an era before airmail or even transatlantic cables didn’t ultimately impede the cross germination of ideas and systems to any significant extent. The births of those organizations were independent but not unrelated events. Human affairs are rife with independent but not unrelated events.
One January very early in my first fulltime ministry I preached a sermon touching on both Roe v Wade and MLK, Jr. A few days earlier a newspaper reporter, who happened to also be a member of the UU some thirty miles down the road from the one I was serving and had read about the sermon topic in our newsletter, asked me if I was prepared for the vitriol that would be coming my way for combining the two topics in a single sermon. Until he asked the question it hadn’t occurred to me that the combination might be upsetting to some folks–though I was prepared for possible push back due to preaching about abortion access in the shadow of the Golden Dome of the University of Notre Dame. It was probably not my most thoughtfully conceived or exquisitely crafted sermon, but from that day to this no one other than that reporter has ever even remarked on that unlikely mash-up of topics, much less sent vitriol my way. Which gives me courage all these years later, to offer a mashup of Juneteenth and Pride. I do so here this morning neither lightly nor because I think neither one is worthy of its own sermon nor solely because there are only so many Sundays in June–this month of Pride and Juneteenth and our Soul Matters theme of the Practice of Freedom.
I don’t think civil rights are interchangeable. I don’t believe oppressions are interchangeable or indistinguishable, one from another. I do believe that liberation is liberation is liberation. And none of us are free until all of us are free. That’s why I preached about abortion access on the 25th Anniversary of Roe v Wade, even though it was MLK weekend. And why I didn’t not preach about MLK just because I was determined to preach about abortion. And that’s why I’m preaching about both Juneteenth and Pride this morning. Because independent events are seldom unrelated events. Because moments come for genesis of structures to support and transmit ideas and beliefs long marginalized by happenstance or choice
In his piece on Juneteenth in the New Yorker in 2019 Jelani Cobb, points out the shameful reality that the enslaved people of Texas learned of their emancipation thirty months after it had been granted. Furthermore, he sets Juneteenth alongside the 4th of July as counterpoints–the latter herald[ing] the arrival of American ideals, the former stress[ings] just how hard it has been to live up to them. Cobbs’ observation rings even more true in 2025 than when he wrote those words in 2019. The 2023 Supreme Court ruling effectively eliminating affirmative action in high education admission processes; the current administration’s policy of returning the names of Confederate ‘heros’ back to military bases, even as it attempts to circumvent federal statute by claiming to rename them in honor of other service members who happen to share the same name as the Confederates; the administration’s ruthless, clumsy and widespread effort to erase and rewrite history, particularly with regard to BIPOC individuals and LGBTQIA individuals; its determined effort to erase DEI initiatives–including even the words ‘diversity’, ‘equity’, ‘inclusion’–from all federal programs and websites; the wholesale collusion of many corporations in disbanding their DEI programs, initiatives and officers; the disproportionate rate (as a percentage of total population) at which black people are incarcerated–all these are but a few of the ways we are currently failing to live up to and into the ideals enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and our other founding documents.
And because oppressions are not interchangeable but are interconnected, because none of us is free until all of us are free, I understand Pride, celebrated in this month in most places, even if we do it in our own time here in Savannah later in the year, I understand Pride as a counterpoint, too. The parades, festivals, street dances, born out of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, serve not only as joyous celebrations of being alive in 2025 as LGBTQIA folks, celebrations of our existence, beauty, holiness as queer people, but also a reminder that more than 50 years after that uprising against anti-GLBT police brutality, transpeople–especially transwomen of color–are attacked every day and often killed; that families are uprooting their existence to move to states where their children can continue to receive life saving, gender affirming medical care; that “LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers” (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020), not due to their identity but rather due to mistreatment and stigmatization because of their identity; that as many as 1000 trans service members have been forced out of US armed forces since the current administration took office that indeed the very words ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ have been removed from the National Park Service website dedicated to the history and significance of the Stonewall Uprising. Pride at its best doesn’t paint over this reality with rainbows and glitter and bubbles; at its best, like Juneteenth, it calls us to live up to and into our highest ideals of liberty and justice and love.
1776 Declaration of Independence, 1788 ratification of the US Constitution, 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, 1865 General Order No. 3 (Juneteenth), 1896 Plessy v Ferguson (separate but equal), 1954 Brown v Board of Education (overturning Plessy), 1963 the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1964 the Civil Right Act, 1965 the Voting Rights Act, 2020 the murder of George Floyd and subsequent summer of racial reckoning, 2023 the dismantling of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, 1967 Loving v Virginia (ending prohibition of mixed race marriages). 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges (allowing same sex marriage throughout the country). The history of the United States is a history of declaring rights and freedoms, granting rights and freedoms, failing to live up to and abide by the stated laws of the land regarding rights and freedoms, and rescinding rights and curtailing freedoms.
Enslaved and formerly enslaved people and GLBTQIA people are in this sermon because this is June, but similar lists of famous dates and names and actions exist with regard to indigenous people, Asian American Pacific Islanders, Latinx, other people of color, migrants, veterans, people with disabilities, people unable to find jobs or secure a living wage, people drowning in medical debt. And for each of these well known and documented dates and court cases and names, hundreds more are lesser known or undocumented. Lynchings; acts of generosity and kindness; bigots with power at every level of government trampling liberties; ordinary people protecting the rights, livelihoods and lives of neighbors and strangers. Back and forth. Counterpoint after counterpoint. Not written into our histories like Stonewall and Juneteenth but every bit as consequential in the lives of the people affected.
A colleague asked recently if we’re participating in collective gaslighting by carrying on with business as usual in these times that are not anyway near usual. I can think of at least three answers to that question. I’ll get to those answers in a moment, but just now, I want to say what is unequivocally gaslighting is for elected officials at every level of government and ordinary citizens alike to say over and over and over and over again, “this is not who we are, this assassination and attempted assassination of state legislators and their spouses in Minnesota, this shooting at a No Kings demonstration in Utah, this shooting at a high school, grocery store, temple, in the streets of Savannah, is not who we are.” Saying these things again and again, every single time, is gaslighting because this is exactly who we are–a nation fascinated with firearms and lacking the will or courage to restrict their wide availability and unfettered access. Not by any means necessary, but even by the slightest, least obtrusive, common sense measures.
Now, to return to my colleague’s question. First, I would ask in response, “Are we carrying on with business as usual? Is anyone actually pretending that this is normal? That’s not what I’m observing.”
Second, I would say, “Of course, it would be gaslighting to carry on with normal everyday business as usual life (to the extent that that might be happening), as if ICE isn’t tearing families apart, as if the policies of this administration aren’t ruining our economy and threatening the health and wellbeing of our children (and everyone who is medically fragile) and endangering our stability in the world and damaging our humanity by withdrawing aid from every corner where US dollars and human resources have sown hope. Of course, it is gaslighting deliberately to neither see nor speak of the horrors being perpetrated in our name.”
Yet, my third answer, my final answer for the time being, would be “No, it is not gaslighting”. If we do carry on with business as usual, we do it not as a deliberate and cruel attempt to convince anyone that the reality of the situation is anything other than what it is. We carry on as usual, as well as we are able, in between demonstrating and weeping, in between calling elected representatives and speaking the truth of what we experience and witness, in between lying away at night and searching for the next best course of action, we carry on as usual, because the people in our immediate circles–our children, our neighbors, our parents, our students, our congregants (if we are pastors)–need to be fed and cared for, body and soul. They need us to carry on as usual, as we have the capacity to do so, because they need to know both that they’re not alone in their beliefs and their fear, and that not everyone shares their beliefs and fears.
By having church and doing church, we say those things. By reading bedtime stories and hosting block parties, we say those things. We say, you are not alone in your experience and neither is your experience shared by everyone in this country, this city, this neighborhood. By volunteering as we have always done, by showing up to work and paying our taxes, and by caring for our own physical and mental well-being, by these we say those things, too, and we say something more–we say we, we’re in it for the long haul. We’re not folding.
On Juneteenth, during Pride, and at all the other already/not yet counterpoints, we celebrate what has been achieved, even as we recognize that it was overdue when it finally arrived and still is not whole even today. And in the meantime, weary though we are, enraged though we are, we disrupt what needs disrupting and in ordinary day in and day out ways, we keep ourselves, our spirits, our relationships alive through the disruption and into what future the disruption will usher in. It’s what we have always done in such moments in history. It’s what has kept humanity alive in the hearts of individual souls in places and times of unspeakable inhumanity. May it preserve our humanity even now. Amen.
