Category Archives: LGBTQ & Gender

The Shadow at the Pride Festival

A year ago last Saturday, the Friends Meeting I’m part of took a big step, for us: we rented a booth at the Alamance Pride Festival, held in a large park in downtown Burlington NC.

The Spring booth, with a blogger on duty at the table.

Outwardly, our booth was not particularly eye-catching. Amid the fluttering of a thousand floating rainbows, the yellow table banner we made for it is about as gaudy as we get. Spring Friends Meeting has been what many call an “affirming” congregation for more than a dozen years, and we’ve paid our share of dues for that. But we didn’t do it for publicity, and we haven’t done much of what many others call evangelism, which we’d  rather name “outreach.” We have  lots of opinions about things, but are  mostly quiet about them.

Maybe too quiet. Spring has been gathering for Quaker worship in southern Alamance County for 251 years, but we soon found out in the booth that hardly anyone we talked to knew we were there.  Which meant that Pride was a great opportunity for our outreach aspirations, but it also brought home the suspicion that maybe we had been a bit too ready to “hide our lamp under a bushel,” for much of those two-and-a-half centuries, which is something the gospel says not to do. There’s a false modesty which at bottom is mostly a mix of snobbery and pride.
Continue reading The Shadow at the Pride Festival

William Penn Died This Week; Just When We Needed Him Most

Three hundred and six years ago, on July 30, 1718, William Penn died, in England. Aged 73, he had been in very poor health for almost six years, after a massive stroke in 1712.

This is not exactly news. And in recent years, Penn has been out of fashion in many Quaker quarters — disowned and erased for having owned slaves, who labored at his estate Pennsbury in his proprietary colony of Pennsylvania.

The slaveowning was bad, and should not be forgotten. But if we cancel and further erase Penn, it is Friends, and friends of Friends, who are in my judgment the big losers.  Especially now. Continue reading William Penn Died This Week; Just When We Needed Him Most

Meme Alert: This Just Fell Out of My Coconut Tree . . .

 

The Economist:

United States | The “brat” vote
Is Kamala Harris “brat”?

America’s TikTok election just became more interesting

Jul 25th 2024|new york

“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”, begins a viral clip of Kamala Harris. It resurfaced in the days after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, but this video has a twist.

The song “Von dutch”, by a British pop star, Charli xcx, begins to rev in the background. Ms Harris’s signature belly laugh rises up. A lime-green filter with the word “brat”—the cover art and name of xcx’s new album—flashes across the screen.

“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” says Ms Harris. The beat drops. Enter supercuts of Ms Harris.

Continue reading Meme Alert: This Just Fell Out of My Coconut Tree . . .

My True Confession, from 1968: All Downhill from There

Here it is:

I didn’t vote for Hubert Humphrey for president in 1968. Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, by less than one percent. And as Andy Young had warned me, it’s been (almost) all downhill from there.

Not that I voted for Nixon instead. Or for George Wallace, the fiery segregationist Alabama governor, who carried five deep southern states that year.

Instead, I didn’t vote at all.

I’m not proud of it; but my feelings and regrets are not the point here. Continue reading My True Confession, from 1968: All Downhill from There