Lgbtq Leaders Quotes

religious leader.” Such pride is very dangerous

What I really wish is that religious leaders could truly understand what the Bible is and stop trying to use it for hatred. I wish they could just stop hiding behind the Bible and live up to the fact that what they really stand for when they are bashing gays is small-minded bigotry.

I’m constantly learning more about myself and experiencing the world as a queer person: your body, sexuality, femininity, style, the way you present yourself to the world. All of these things can be a really loaded part of a queer person’s life without them even necessarily realizing it. The ultimate goal for me is complete freedom to express myself—however I please and however I feel is natural. It’s a work in progress to get to that point and I hope to stay on that journey.

Ex-gay leaders had a narrative that explained stories like Kevin’s: that’s what happens when you choose to give in to your flesh, they would say. The gay lifestyle is full of drugs and binge sex with strangers. They never said people like Kevin were driven to destructive behaviors because of shame-based cycles of repression and religious prohibition. No, people like Kevin who embraced the lifestyle embodied the ethics and ideals of the LGBTQ community. Ex-gay leaders denied the existence of a loving, committed same-sex relationship. According to leaders in my community, true love was only possible among heterosexual Christians.

But it was Mike Mullen’s testimony before the committee that same day that really made news, as he became the first sitting senior U.S. military leader in history to publicly argue that LGBTQ persons should be allowed to openly serve: “Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me personally, it comes down to integrity, theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.

Not long before my heart was shredded by “Ryan,” I saw the superb, painful, and infuriating documentary God Loves Uganda, a film by the astounding Roger Ross Williams. The doc examined the role of American evangelicalism in Uganda, its ties to a recently introduced bill, the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act—which then suggested the death penalty for LGBTQ+ people—as it gained serious momentum. It follows missionaries, evangelical leaders, and the LGBTQ+ people of Uganda who fight for their right to exist. These activists were standing up against vicious oppression, rhetoric, and ideas originally introduced and continuously perpetuated by the West. Concealed in “good deeds,” American missionaries created infrastructure for access to indoctrinate the populace, which fueled anti-LGBTQ+ violence and hate.

The faggots and their friends now live in Ramrod. The leader of Ramrod is Warren-And-His-Fuckpole. He is the leader of Ramrod because he is the most paranoid and therefore the most vicious man in the land. Warren wants to know who the leader of the faggots is so he can rationalize with him. But the faggots have no leader. They have only dead heroes. Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the fierceness of its weapons and the touchiness of its leaders. To support their violence, the rich men without color who own Ramrod send their tax collectors out to steal the people's work; they send their shifty-eyed ones out to sell the people machines which do not work and security which is not dependable; they send their thugs and goons out to take peacefulness away from the people. The more the rich men without color can steal from or take or sell to the people, the more violence they can buy. Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the elaborateness of its violence and its eagerness to use it.

Why Trump, many wondered, including many evangelicals themselves. For decades, the Religious Right had been kindling fear in the hearts of American Christians. It was a tried-and-true recipe for their own success. Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, and the erosion of religious freedom—evangelical leaders had rallied support by mobilizing followers to fight battles on which the fate of the nation, and their own families, seemed to hinge. Leaders of the Religious Right had been amping up their rhetoric over the course of the Obama administration. The first African American president, the sea change in LGBTQ rights, the apparent erosion of religious freedom—coupled with looming demographic changes and the declining religious loyalty of their own children—heightened the sense of dread among white evangelicals. But in truth, evangelical leaders had been perfecting this pitch for nearly fifty years. Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man, someone who wasn’t restrained by political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause. Try as they might—and they did try—no other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.” 6

It's important to remember that having a conversation about us (LGBT) without us will usually be a recycling or preconceived ideas and misconceptions. Can you imagine a group of male church leaders discussing the role of women in the church without females present. We would call that misogyny. Or church leadership discussing indigenous issues without ever consulting with indigenous people themselves to get insight into what their life experience is really all about. We would call that white supremacy/racism/elitism. The church has done a great deal of talking about us but rarely has spoken with us. So when church leaders discuss LGBT people, relationships and the community without speaking with or spending time getting to know LGBT people it does beg the question why. What is there to fear? Why the exclusion? Is this another evidence of homophobia? It's time for the church to invite LGBT people into the conversation. For some this is a conversation about their thoughts and beliefs but for us it is about who we are. You can ask questions. What was it like to sit in church and hear the word abomination to describe your orientation. What was it like to get to the point of coming out knowing you might be rejected by those you've loved and a church you've served.? How did you find resolution of your Christian beliefs and your sexuality? In listening you will learn. That's why it's so important to remember. No conversation about us, without us.

By the time he came around to shake hands at the conclusion of his speech, I’d been reduced to a twelve-year-old girl at a One Direction concert. I was shaking and nervous and sweating and seriously crushing. If it had been socially acceptable, I would’ve started screaming at the top of my lungs like the fangirl that I am. I tried to hold on to my politics. But Jacob, you have to remain critical. He still hasn’t issued an executive order banning workplace discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. Statistically, he hasn’t slowed deportations. You still disagree with some of this man’s foreign policy decisions. And you don’t like drone warfare. You must remain critical, my brain said. It is important. NAH FUCK THAT! screamed my heart and girlish libido, gossiping back and forth like stylists at a hair salon. Can you even believe how handsome he is? He is sooooo cute! Oh my God, is he looking at you right now? OH MY GOD JACOB HE’S LOOKING AT YOU! And he was. Before I knew what was happening, it was my turn to shake his hand and say hello. And in my panic, in my giddy schoolgirl glee, all I could muster, all I could manage to say at a gay party at the White House, was: “We’re from Duke, Mr. President! You like Duke Basketball don’t you?” “The Blue Devils are a great team!” he said back, smiling and shaking my hand before moving on. WHAT. Jacob. jacob jacob jacob. JACOB. You had ONE CHANCE to say something to the leader of the free world and all you could talk about was Duke Basketball, something you don’t even really like? I mean, you’ve barely gone to one basketball game, and even then it was only to sing the national anthem with your a cappella group. Why couldn’t you think of something better? How about, “Do you like my shoes, Mr. President?” Or maybe “Tell Michelle I’m her number one fan!” Literally anything would’ve been better than that.

DON’T DESTROY YOUR CHILD’S FAITH My Christianity had died the death of a thousand nicks and cuts. —Bart Campolo I’m convinced that it is not the hard things our faith requires of us, some crosses we are unwilling to bear, that destroys our faith. It is the “thousand nicks and cuts” that hack away at us, day after day—the shaming from family, the disdain in our own church, the requirements of the leadership or the youth leader—that make our kids (or us) finally say, “I’m done.

but many others who were silenced by the White House and by Black male leaders of the civil rights movement. Like… Black women. Daisy Bates read a short vow, a pledge on behalf of women working within the movement. But Dorothy Height, a powerful leader who helped organize the event and was the only woman to stand on the platform with Dr. King, was not invited to speak. Nor was Rosa Parks. Or so many other Black women whose work had fueled the movement. Black LGBTQ+ leaders. Bayard Rustin, a key adviser to Dr. King and an organizer of the event, was not invited to speak. Nor was James Baldwin, a Black novelist who, through his writings, had become a brilliant and bold political voice. Malcolm X. He attended the event but was not invited to speak.

Without optimism, you can’t make progress. If you’re a pessimist, you’re already defeated.

But I said, No, something’s gotta be done about it. It’s gonna cost me, but I’m gonna risk it all and I’m gonna come out. That’s an optimistic act. To say that I’m gonna be fully me, I’m going to be completely, 100 percent me, and I will try to do something about it.

Optimism is what gets progress. Pessimism gets nowhere. We all are pulling at the same wagon. We’re doing it collectively. No one person does it. And it’s important to recognize that. We all have to work together in concert.

It wasn’t that I was just like everybody else except for this element. I felt wholly other.

There’s a vigilance to being queer.

I’m very thankful and proud to be a part of a community, and I consider myself really lucky to be queer. It’s a special human experience that can bring people together.

a lot of my adult life as a queer person has been deprogramming and unlearning a lot of things I taught myself or was taught as a little kid.

We now get to benefit from the hard work of the people who came before us, and the people who have fought to make this possible for us.

You have to make sure the view of how you’re treated doesn’t poison the view of how you think about yourself.

I had never given much thought to the significance of how when growing up queer, we often sought refuge in our own minds. With nobody else to talk to, we were left to figure out what was happening to us, and around us, by ourselves. Deep, maddening, and complex conversations with ourselves—at a very young age—about who we are, why we feel this way, and what this all means.

When we receive invaluable information, we each have the responsibility to integrate it into our daily lives and begin to dispel the noxious influences that have created stifling, straightjacketed limitations.

We sometimes protect ourselves by building walls around ourselves. But there are those who show us a better way. We can learn to build windows in those walls, to take in new vistas, and even climb out to seek the sunlit world awaiting us.

There’s sexuality and then there’s gender. It felt to me that there was nothing worse you could possibly be than a “girly boy” or a “boyish girl.” Any variation from what we come as children to understand as “that’s a boy” and “that’s a girl” was punished, reviled, and profoundly misunderstood. “What are you?” was the worst thing you could possibly be asked. And I was asked a lot.

I really believe I have grown into myself. We will sit down three years from now and I will have grown into myself even further. And so I don’t reject or resent what I was doing then. I don’t take it to be not who I was. I don’t think I could be doing what I’m doing now if I hadn’t done that. But I can’t do that again. It served me until it didn’t.

Understand that bringing your entire self to your work is what will make you extraordinary at the work.

The mission of my life is to make queer people feel more connected to each other, and the idea that queer people anywhere are responsible for queer people everywhere. I took a quote from the Talmud that says, All the people of Israel are responsible for each other, and I took that and made it gay.

I found a lot of comfort in hanging out with people who were older than me. People who were gay, who were tattooed, who were getting pierced. They were riding motorcycles to work and I was getting on the back and feeling free amongst people who were very, very different. I felt safe there.

being queer isn’t an inherent advantage. It is something that gives you potential: the possibility of a precious, powerful edge. You have to make it work for you. This is achieved not so much by changing the perceptions of doubters, abusers, and tormenters. Rather, it springs from a shift in perspective that we make within ourselves. A shift that grants each of us the permission to bring the future—and all of our newly aware potential—into focus.

I didn’t know the definition of “gay.” I thought I was the only one who felt that way. It was very lonely. But that was when I started learning to act what I didn’t feel.

It just never occurred to me that there would be a part of me that was wrong.

I knew I was different, and I struggled to articulate and identify the difference. I was different in a lot of ways. I wasn’t very good at being a kid. All the kids seemed to know how to bound into rooms with groups of other kids and be okay, and how to run and play at recess and be carefree. I never had that sense of carefreeness. I don’t know if that was specific to being a pre-gay child or just who I am, but that was my sense of where I was. I’m very aware that I have grown into myself.

I do think our gender, our sexuality, all of our identity, is active. It is a thing you have to invest in, process for yourself, create for yourself. And I don’t mean “create” to imply an artificiality or fraudulence. I mean quite the reverse. It’s an excavation and a formulation. For me, that active work wasn’t formed enough then to even have had a conversation other than to just feel wrong.

We need to change the way we talk about LGBTQ+ people. There are 4.5 percent of us. That’s not a defect. That’s not worthless. It’s chosen. And if we start to talk about it like that—like the blessing and gift that it is—and we raise our LGBTQ+ youth to understand they have been chosen to have this incredible opportunity that is a blessing, we can help them along earlier.

There are two distinct views. One is keeping you safe and making sure you’re not living in a fantasyland, thinking that rainbows and #LoveIsLove mean everything is okay. You have to be an alert person. In the other view, you have to protect your queerness, nurture it, invest in it, rely on it, and make sure nothing seeps into it that will poison the way you feel about yourself and your beauty as a queer person. Because that is where your divinity is. That’s where your answers are.

Queer kinship is a very, very real thing.

Has any bullying you experienced as a child stayed with you? Yeah, it’s all still there. I remember the first person. It was in sixth grade and he said, “Cliff, you are so fairy nice.” I remember it as clear as if it just happened right now. It does show up sometimes, even in the corporate world. If I am dealing with straight male colleagues who are higher in rank than me, it sometimes can be a trigger—particularly if they get mad, frustrated, or upset. I have this reflexive instinct to want to please them. I want them to like me. I’ve worked on it over the years, but the demons are still there.

the more I learned through speaking with people and reading about our history, the angrier I became.

In some parts of the world, being gay is a punishable act. And in a way, living out and speaking out for gay rights, for other gay people, and for other people in the LGBTQ+ community, is a political act in itself. But for me and for a lot of other people, it’s our daily life.

Being queer pushed me to be my best because I didn’t want to be anything other than that for the people who have come before me

So, in a way, it sort of relieved pressure I was putting on myself, because I could channel it into doing this for other people. It’s sometimes easier to do things for other people than it is for ourselves.

When you look at some of the great fashion, art, music, film, literature, there’s a queer person in the mix, in a very big way, making that happen. Whether or not we choose to tap into it, it’s a gift we all have. It’s that twinkle in our eyes.

People who are queer are authentic, not out of choice, but out of survival.

When you get past living in the closet, you’re really committed to that self-expression, which becomes your passport to freedom on a lot of levels.

I like how heteronormative culture is now adopting this concept of authenticity. Different cultures and different tribes within society are now adopting authenticity: women, people of color, body acceptance. Self-expression is power. I don’t know what else is more powerful than self-expression.

I’m really good with people as a function of compensating for the fact that my presence makes them uncomfortable.

Has your perception of being gay changed? One hundred percent. I now think it’s the biggest blessing. I feel bad for my straight friends. For example, they have to deal with the expectation of marriage and kids by a certain age. To some degree, they probably have to continue to adhere to those expectations I’ve held myself to—of being a professional of a certain kind. Achieving a certain kind of success as externally defined, rather than internally defined. Which, when you come out, you unshackle yourself from. Straight men are wonderful, but a lot of them keep each other at arm’s length. They don’t get too close, aren’t that friendly, feel they’ve got to be a certain idea of what it means to be “macho” and a “man.” And a man is solid and not that nice. If they have an emotion, it’s anger and no other emotions besides that. Being gay has helped me understand that, no, being friendly is great. You should be friendly to everybody, you should make relationships with people: straight men, women, nonbinary people, whomever. It’s helped me understand how to not be judgmental. It’s helped me understand how to try to make my own way in life and not to find success according to money or a title, but according to fulfillment. Empirically speaking, when I look at straight men in the world, so many of them seem boxed in by toxic masculinity and this idea of being strong, tough, and not vulnerable. And that’s bullshit. Being gay helps you get out of that toxic masculine vortex and start thinking, What are my values? What kind of person do I want to be? For most, that helps us be friendlier, more open, more positive, more inclined to be supportive of people, and less inclined to judge. Being gay has shaped who I am in a huge way and made me a more positive and optimistic person; someone who can deal with people better, who can be more mature, and more self-confident. I am also a white guy though. I am a beneficiary of that privilege, too, and it behooves me not to put this all on homosexuality as if I get to claim minority status and not recognize the rest of my privilege.

For me, it’s very important to try to be successful to create opportunities for other queer people, for other Black people, for other women, for other people who identify as all of the above. Because it’s not a good thing for me to be one of one.

I’m very proud to be in a position to hire people. It’s important to me to be able to hire people who identify in the same way I do. So part of it is wanting to amass and retain a certain amount of power and privilege so that I can do that for other people.

I realized how much more power I had because I was playing with my whole heart and speaking with my full throat.

It’s never too late to become yourself.

In the end, being queer has meant I was different. When you’re a child or adolescent, being different is such a curse. All you want to do is to fit in. And then you realize that all those people who fit in are bores. They will spend their whole lives being bores and being nothing. And that, as a queer person, the very thing that caused all those tears is now your glorious gift. And it enables you to turn the thing you always thought was your curse into your superpower.

Being queer gives you X-ray vision. Superman has the ability to see through walls and bricks. Being queer gives you the ability to see into people’s hearts, just like you have radioactive blood. You can see into other people’s hearts and know how much turmoil there is, and to respond to them with kindness, sympathy, and love.

Everyone should be able to bring all of themselves to the workplace and feel like they don’t have to hide or cover. You can only be your best when you embrace your authentic self.

If you want to see positivity in front of you, you have to radiate it yourself. If you’re a nasty person at all times of every day, then that’s what you’re gonna attract to yourself.

but I do think there is a part of me that has always wanted or needed to be the best, so that I would be unimpeachable or inarguable.

Shine brightly. Shine the fuck on. Feel your strength. Move through the world undeterred.

How has being queer advantaged you in your career? For one thing, it’s given me a sense of fierceness. When you get beaten up for who you are, when you get told that who you are and what you are is an impossibility, when you are teased and bullied and hated just for the sheer fact of who you are, it lights a fire in you. A fire to set things right. A fire to get your revenge and, at least in my case, to get your revenge by succeeding. No matter how low they brought you, you know that by the sheer fire of your imagination and creativity and your refusal to die, that you will have the last laugh in the end.

I reveled in my difference. For the most part, I wanted to celebrate what made me different. I knew I had something other people didn’t. And part of that was being queer and being able to bridge the communication gap between men and women.

But I will reiterate that I think queer people are magic, and I do want to have it both ways. I’m very like, Love is love, let’s have all the rights. Let’s have all of the options and opportunities and flexibility that are afforded straight people. Let’s be protected and let’s be like everyone else. And there’s this kind of radical and contrarian part of me that’s like, No. Fuck that, we’re not like them. We are different, and arguably better. I don’t want what makes us different and special to be eroded in our continued quest for equality. Fiercely protecting and celebrating what is special and distinct and unique about queer people as a whole is super-important. And they’re not mutually exclusive. I think we can have both.

Being a practical leader means not reinventing the wheel — don’t start something that already exists. It means respecting those with more experience than you have. It means making sure everyone is heart at meetings, especially people of color, women, members of the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities — and it means recognising that all those things intersect. It means that people with privilege, including yourself, should focus on listening. It means creating a space where people can be wrong, and people can fail, and the work can continue.

Is Israel really the biggest, baddest wolf on the block? Heck no. Even if you put every single one of Israel’s mistakes under a microscope, they still wouldn’t come close to those of many other countries around the world. In Saudi Arabia, Chop Square is literally a place for weekly public decapitations. In Dubai, the working class are literal slaves. In China, disappearances are normal and Muslims are being tracked and put into camps. In Turkey, journalists and activists are imprisoned and killed. In Iran, LGBTQ+ people are executed. In Syria, the government uses chemical weapons against its own people. In Russia, there is arbitrary detention, and worse. In Myanmar, the army is massacring the Rohingya Muslim population. In Brunei, Sharia law was just enacted. In North Korea—no description needed. All over the world, millions of people are dying because of tyrannical leaders, civil wars, and unimaginable atrocities. But you don’t see passionate picket lines against Dubai or Turkey or even Russia. The one country that’s consistently singled out is… Israel. The UN has stated values of human dignity, equal rights, and economic and social advancement that are indeed fantastic, and they are the values upon which Israel was established and is operating. The sting is it that countries that certainly do not adhere to some or any of these values are often the ones who criticize Israel while keeping a straight face. “Look over there!” those leaders say, so the world will not look at their backyards and see their own gross human rights violations. All this led to a disproportionate number of UN resolutions against the only Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is an easy punching bag, but this obsession over one country only is being used to deflect time and energy away from any real discussion of human rights in the world’s actual murderous regimes. And Israelis aren’t the only ones who have noticed this disproportionate censorship. The United States uses its veto power to shut down almost every Security Council resolution against Israel, and it does this not because of “powerful lobbies” (sorry to burst your bubble). The reason the US shuts down most of these resolutions is because the US gets it. In a closed-door meeting of the Security Council in 2002, former US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte is said to have stated that the US will oppose every UN resolution against Israel that does not also include: condemnation of terrorism and incitement to terrorism, condemnation of various terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and a demand for improvement of security for Israel as a condition for Israeli withdrawal from territories. If a resolution doesn’t include this basic and rational language, the US will veto it. And it did and it does, thank the good Lord, in what we know today as the Negroponte Doctrine.

The religious right and the alt-right are bonded together by shared grievances over a supposedly lost America in which Christians don’t have to bake cakes for gay couples and white people don’t have to bow to “multiculturalism” or “political correctness.” But this fused political bloc does not actually long for a mythical past of the formerly “great” America that Trump idealized for them. Instead, it envisions a future in which America, and the hard-won values it codified over the past seven decades—desegregation and church-state separation by the Supreme Court; laws passed by Congress to protect the rights of minorities such as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the 1965 Immigration Act; the advance of rights for women and LGBTQ people—loses its standing as a moral and political leader in the world and is transformed into a nativist power that accords different rights to different groups of people, based on race, religion, and ethnicity. For the ideologues of this bloc, America has so lost its bearings that they must look now to leadership outside of the United States to lead it out of an abyss. Their shared target: modern, pluralistic liberal democracy that is led by what they would disparage as “globalists” who are destroying “Western civilization.

I'll never forget the supposed LGBTQ leader up on that stage shouting at us all, "Wait! Where are you going? I'm not done!" And how most refused to heed her demand to stand still. Not tonight. Not one minute longer. We marched.

The Christian right’s religious freedom agenda isn’t just about holiday greetings and clergy endorsement of candidates. Most urgently in 2016, the leaders who met with Trump that day had spent the past eight years fighting some of the signature achievements of Barack Obama’s presidency: the passage of the Affordable Care Act, particularly its regulation requiring that employer-sponsored health care plans include full coverage for contraception, and the rapid and historic expansion of LGBTQ rights.

ONE STORY OF the Trump years that sticks with me was related to me by a high school student who went to a discussion of political issues with a group of progressive teenagers in an affluent part of the Washington, D.C., metro area. The group’s leader went around the room asking the students what issues they considered significant and then getting a show of hands on the importance of each one. Racism was mentioned, and sexism, and LGBTQ issues, and gun control, and the environment. The student raised her hand and said, “Labor.” It was, she told me, the only suggestion that drew no support at all.

1) “How did I end up down this rabbit hole of being obsessed with men on the DL (down-low)? Why did I prefer playing more in the straight arena with the closet cases (as they were called in my day) and the bisexual men over the gay ones?” 2) “We didn’t identify in my day; you were either gay, bisexual, or straight. People will always label others or pigeonhole them without even knowing for sure who they really are. They presumably stereotype and judge just by your outward appearance.” 3) “It wasn't until the seventh grade that Sister Gloria would be my social studies teacher, and I began leaning more towards being an extrovert than the anxious introvert that I was. All the accolades go to her. She lit the flame under my ass that would be the catalyst for my advocacy. Her podium, located front and center of the classroom, became ground zero for me and where I found my voice.” 4) “Their taunting was my kryptonite. My peers hated me for no other reason than the fact that they thought I was gay. I was only thirteen and often wondered how they knew who I was before I did.” 5) “Evangelical Christian Anita Bryant (First Lady of Religious Bigotry), along with her minions, led a crusade against the LGBTQ community back in 1977 and said we were trying to recruit children and that ‘Homosexuals are human garbage.’ My first thoughts were, how unchristian and deplorable of her to even say something like that, not to mention, to make it her life’s mission promoting hate.” 6) “Are there any more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of Christians in this country today? Dr. King knew about his friend’s homosexuality and arrest. Being a religious man and a pastor, Dr. King could have cast judgment and shunned Bayard Rustin like so many other religious leaders did at the time. But he didn’t. That, to me, is the true meaning of being a Christian. He loved Bayard unconditionally and was unbiased towards his sexual orientation. Dr. King was not a counterfeit Christian and practiced what he preached—and that, along with remembering what Jesus had said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ is the bottom line to Christianity and all faiths.” 7) “We are all God’s children! That is what I was taught in Catholic school. God doesn’t make mistakes—it’s as simple as that. Love is love—period! I don’t need anyone’s validation or approval, I define myself.” 8) “You will bake our cakes, you will provide us our due healthcare, you will do our joint tax returns, and yes, you will bless our unions, too. Otherwise, you cannot call yourselves Christians or even Americans, for that matter.” 9) “The torch has been passed. But we must never forget the LGBT pioneers that have come before and how they fought in the streets for our lives. Never forget the Stonewall riots of 1969 nor the social stigma put upon us during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from its onset in the early 1980s. Remember how many died alone because nobody cared. Finally, keep in mind how we were all pathologized and labeled in the medical books until 1973.

Whenever one comes to the the table for interreligous dialogue, there is what I would call an _ecumenical taboo_ that one has to comply with. The ecumenical taboo_ does not exist in a written document, but people tend to practice it around the dialogue table. One should not raise, for instance, such questions as gender justice, sexual orientation issues, religious constructions of the other, multiple forms of violence in a religious community, or religious cooperation with neo/imperialism. each religion has its own _history of sin_ that has justified and perpetuated oppression and exclusion of certain groups of people through its own religious teaching, doctrine, and practice. In order to be _nice_ and _tolerant_ to one another, interreligious dialogue has not challenged the fundamental issues of injustice that a particular religion has practiced, justified, and perpetuated in various ways. I do not disregard that most ecumenists have based interreligious dialogue on a politics of tolerance, and this has played a significant role in easing the antagonism between religions, at least among the leaders of established religions. However, we should ground an authentic ecumenism and theology of religion in a _politics of affirmation and transformation, rather than a politics of tolerance_.