Next Stop: World Pride
By RABBI SHARON KLEINBAUM
This weekend, thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from all over the world will join us as we march down Fifth Avenue to celebrate the Stonewall uprising 37 years ago here in New York.
Their presence not only affirms our ubiquity but also shows us to be as diverse as humankind itself. Our sexual identities cut across every religious, cultural, social, economic and political division in the world.
This coming August, WorldPride 2006 in Jerusalem will celebrate our existence, our lives and our struggles as gay people on every continent, in every country, every society, every culture-and every religion.
Our worldwide struggle for gay rights is part and parcel of the worldwide struggle of people everywhere to assert their dignity as human beings and to achieve the freedom to live a life that is not a curse but a blessing for themselves and everyone else as well.
Paradoxically, our rejected identities can provide a common ground for people everywhere to join together to overcome their divisions and heal their wounds. The Jerusalem Open House, for example, is the only organization in that divided and divisive city in which Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims, Jews and Christians, secular and Orthodox, can meet and work side by side in common cause.
We are celebrating WorldPride 2006 in Jerusalem because Jerusalem is a holy city for more than half the people on earth-Jews, Muslims and Christians-and because we believe that the message of love and tolerance at the heart of these three great world religions must not be abandoned in the face of those of their adherents who preach instead a message of hatred and bigotry not only against gay people but against one another.
Worldwide, the religious right has hijacked the language of religion to promote its reactionary political agenda. The religious right of all three religions constantly seeks to expand the legal force of its own reactionary theology. Their anti-gay campaigns serve this effort. In this regard, the Christian religious right in America is no different from the religious right that wants Israel to be a Jewish theocracy, or the religious right that established an Islamic theocracy in Iran.
But the enemy is not religion. The enemy is the bigotry and divisiveness of the religious right. If we are going to continue building on our successes so far, we must learn to confront our right wing religious opponents on their home ground. And this is more than an expedient strategy. The search for meaning in the face of the deeper questions of life and death are what religion is all about.
A year ago this past February, The New York Times published a front page photograph and article featuring six leaders of Christianity, Judaism and Islam who had met in Jerusalem to protest plans to hold WorldPride there. These six men are otherwise barely on speaking terms with each other. What brought them together was their hatred of gay people. However extreme their other differences, here they are united-in bigotry.
We are immensely proud of the efforts of all of those who are going to WorldPride 2006 to show the world a Jerusalem that is open and loving rather than these right wing clerics’ Jerusalem of violence and bigotry. Among the many individuals from New York who are going to Jerusalem for WorldPride 2006 are the Rev. Pat Bumgardner from the Metropolitan Community Church of New York; Bishop Zachary Jones from the Unity Fellowship Church; Richard Burns, executive director of the LGBT Community Center; Urvashi Vaid, executive director of the Arcus Foundation; and Matt Foreman, executive director of the NGLTF. My synagogue, CBST, is sending a whole busload of congregants along with Rabbi Cohen and myself.
For the many of us who are religious, WorldPride 2006 is an assertion that we are equal partners in religious communities and in a world in which each and every one of us is created in God’s image. In these times of intolerance and suspicion, we are going to Jerusalem to proclaim that tolerance is holy and Jerusalem belongs to all of us.
The march down Fifth Avenue is short, but after 37 marches we have come a long way. We are freer now than then, but we still have a long way to go. At 37, the post-Stonewall gay rights movement is pushing forty. As a rabbi and a gay rights activist, I often think of the experience of the Jews and their forty year march through the wilderness after escaping from Egypt. The first generation of the flight from Egypt didn’t make it to the Promised Land, and neither did Moses. Neither did Martin Luther King, and we probably won’t either. Nevertheless, the long road to freedom is truly the high road to a life worth living.