The Reverend Irene Monroe

As a consequence of America’s need to showcase her nativist spirit of patriotism, it comes at the expense of fundamental freedoms and protections denied to various disenfranchised, vulnerable, and historically marginalized populations in the country and immigrants.

The scripture has been used as a text of terror by miscreant thugs in power throughout history: slave owners, Nazi sympathizers, apartheid-enforcers, supporters of Japanese-American internment and loyalists opposed to the American Revolution,

Pride is about the varied expressions of the life, gifts, and talents of the entire community. But the divisions in our communities during Pride also show us something troubling and broken within ourselves. And, last year a black queer resistance rose up -across the country and beyond- denouncing the glib notion that “gay is the new black.”

While the Justices did not grant a license to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans blatantly, I, like so many in our community, was hoping the case would render once and for all a cease-and-desist order; thus, resolving the God versus Gay rights dispute for those who want to codify discrimination against us under the guise of religious freedom.

Pope Francis is the consummate flip-flopper of our time. He doublespeaks on issues - first he defends the abusive priest and now he doesn't. He embraces the LGBTQAI community and then he doesn’t. His pastoral demeanor cloaks the iron - fisted church bureaucratic that he is.

Because topics of race in this country are too often talked about in black and white terms, the history of discrimination against other minority groups gets overlooked. Case in point, the Japanese-American internment is not talked about and not often taught, if at all, in American history books.

while UMC states that we have and are of the same sacred worth as heterosexuals, and that the church is committed to the ministry of all people regardless of gender identities and sexual orientations. However, the church also views queer sexualities as sinful.

Scott Lively is accused of persecuting LGBTQI people abroad, resulting in the introduction of an Anti-Homosexuality Bill he helped engineer in Uganda, which is a crime against humanity under international law.

you wonder if he were a white student standing naked and obviously in distress along Cambridge Common in Harvard Square would he have been so dehumanized and humiliated.