by Paul Payne
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
on October 12, 2014
I’ve always enjoyed parades and the Atlanta Pride Festival and parade have been perennial favorites of mine. I was born in Spartanburg, SC and lived there for many years. Several times during the 90’s and 2000’s, I drove down to see the Pride Parade as well as the vendors and civic groups who set up booths in the park.
The inclusion I felt at Pride was the opposite of the many negative messages of exclusion I heard in the media and even from my community and religious leaders. I often found comfort when I looked back through pictures I took over the years and saw the various religious groups, including Atlanta area Unitarian Universalists, marching in the parade and working at their booth in the park to share this inclusive faith.
One of the messages of exclusion in my hometown of Spartanburg occurred in 1996 when the county council passed a resolution saying what it called the “gay lifestyle” was contrary to local values and harmful to the community. The resolution was worded exactly like one that passed in Cobb County, GA a few years earlier. I felt horrible that my own community’s leaders would have voted to endorse such an opinion.
Even though Spartanburg quickly rescinded the resolution after community outcry, neighboring Greenville County decided to pass it. Around that time, packets of information from an unnamed group were hand-delivered to every household in Greenville and some neighboring homes—including mine. These packets included misinformation about gay and lesbian people and even went as far as saying homosexuals weren’t welcome there.
Later, a rally took place at the Greenville minor league baseball field. They called it a “family values” event. It included my governor as a speaker who, with others, spoke negatively of LGBT people and repeated the message of the resolution. It was extremely disheartening to repeatedly hear the idea that I or any LGBT person I knew was seeking to harm families or our community. I simply wanted inclusion and the same rights all humans should have.
But it was during these times of sadness and feelings of being excluded that the work of religious people including fellow Unitarian Universalists meant so much to me. The late Rev. Jennifer Slade was minister at the Greenville UU fellowship and she marched with a handful of other clergy in the SC Pride parade, which took place in Greenville for the first time.
UUs from the fellowship also worked hard with other community groups to encourage the Greenville county council to rescind the resolution. Although they were not successful, their efforts and the efforts of those UUs at the Atlanta Prides taught me the importance of our second principle, which calls for justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Their example challenges me to do the same.
This is why I was so happy to volunteer at the Unitarian Universalist booth yesterday and why I will proudly march with UUs from Northwest and the greater Atlanta area this afternoon at the Pride parade in Atlanta. As I do, I’ll also be cognizant that those simple acts might bring a message of inclusion to someone who needed it as much as I did almost two decades ago.