The Light Is Shining Through

 

The history of the United States has been a struggle to come to grips with pluralism, accepting religious, racial, and now sexual diversity. 

The first immigrants came to the United States in the seventeenth century fleeing genuine religious persecution on a continent reeling under the bloody wars of religion, culminating in the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. Unfortunately, religious divisions continued to plague America until the Founding Fathers declared that church and state should be separate. 

Our African-American brothers and sisters were forced to come here to work as slaves because they were deemed racially inferior. Even after their emancipation, they had to fight, as recently as sixty years ago (Brown vs the Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act of the 1960's), to be integrated into our social fabric after decades of segregation. 

Women, long deemed the legal chattels of men, had to fight, often under brutal conditions, for the right to vote (Woman’s suffrage 1920), and yet much later to be treated as equal parties (as a Nation we still have a ways to go) with a say in the running of our country. 

And now, LGBT citizens, whose only “crime” is to love differently, have emerged after millenia of unjust discrimination, persecution and even death, to claim the right to participate equally and not fear discrimination from those "Christians" (think those who proposed that antigay bill in Arizona), many of whose ancestors (how ironic) fled here to escape religious persecution to found a culture that values liberty and justice for all and not imposing one religion over the others.  

Do you see a pattern in the above history? I'm cautiously optimistic that, in this decade, all the states that make up the United States will see this too and will eventually approve of same-sex marriage and the rights thereof for every corner of America, and we can overcome this, one of the last acceptable prejudices. (But let's be realistic, there will always be some prejudice in society, but with laws to protect those being harassed.)

So let the light start shining through here in America, for as the prophet Isaiah said, we shall truly be “a light to the nations.”