Zero Point Field: 2010 Pride In The U.S.

From the Huffington Post: The Spiritual Significance of Pride

What is the spiritual significance of pride?

June is Pride Month for millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people across the country. During this time each year, we commemorate the weekend of June 27-29, 1969, when the patrons of the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village, fed up with police brutality and harassment towards the LGBT community, resolved to fight back. This turning point represented the birth of the modern LGBT-rights movement.

Many LGBT-affirming churches and other religious communities hold special events during the month of June, including LGBT-themed prayer services and liturgical celebrations. In fact, many of these congregations send contingents to walk in the various pride marches that occur across the country in June. Pride Month is a time for spiritual communities to give thanks for a loving God who has created LGBT people in God's image and likeness and for the intrinsic goodness of our bodies and sexualities.

Pride Month is also a time to honor our LGBT saints and ancestors, including the drag queens at the Stonewall Inn who courageously liberated us by starting the Stonewall riots, as well as all those known and unknown people before us who died of HIV/AIDS or were felled by anti-LGBT violence. Indeed, Pride Month is a sacred time for many of my fellow lay and ordained ministers in the Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination that was founded by and for LGBT people but that is open to all.

Unfortunately, many anti-LGBT Christians have condemned Pride Month as a sinful celebration of debauchery and perversion. They have pointed to the scantily-clad and outrageously-dressed individuals in pride marches as evidence of our nation's moral decay. Fundamentalist Christian protesters have lined the streets holding signs with biblical warnings of how LGBT people will burn in hell for all eternity.

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