Let us always stand for love.
Standing for love is a long game. We may not get what we want in the moment, but in persevering, love always prevails.
Why? Continuously putting ourselves back into the flow of love changes us for the better. It helps us become stronger, more resilient, kinder, and more inclined toward equity and justice. Continuously putting ourselves back into the flow of love reminds us that we are connected to one another, to things outside ourselves. Love helps us to pay attention to the world.
This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down both the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. To me, this time, the legal system stood for love and justice. I’ve said before that we ought not to give one set of citizens rights that another set does not have. If we are to have laws, they must be equitable. That said, I think government should get out of the marriage business. I also recognize that my own relationships are much larger and more fluid than this sort of marriage can encompass. Yes, I came out about this last time we were discussing DOMA.
Today the Supreme Court decided in favor of equity and love. Yesterday, the Supreme Court did the opposite. Yesterday, the Supreme Court gutted the Voters Rights Act, an action which threatens to disenfranchise many people who still need the support of things like district elections in order to give themselves a proper voice in a political system stacked toward the privileged. That does not sound like justice. Nor does it sound like love. It sounds like a further separation of us from one another.
Last night in Texas, there was debate around Senate Bill 5 and whether women have sovereignty over their own bodies. Those who are used to holding the seats the people have imbued with power tried everything to get their way. They stopped a filibuster on technicalities and then pushed through an illegal vote, even going so far as to change the time stamps to read that the voting had been done before the midnight cut off, when hundreds of thousands of watching livestreams and real time reporting on Twitter saw that this was not true. Meanwhile, citizens gathered at the Capitol shouted down the proceedings in what I would say was an attempt to even out the flow of power.
Why do I bring up SB5 and the VRA alongside DOMA and Prop 8? Those of us who are Pagan often speak of being one of the “minority religions” in the U.S. It is minorities who need a voice in the larger whole. It is too easy for “minorities” to be drowned out, discounted, and ignored. Once someone is counted as a “minority” be they black, or gay, Hispanic, female, or Bahai, they simply become the “other” rather than the “one of us.”
Minority has become synonymous with people who lack power. It is incumbent upon us to take that power back. It is incumbent upon us to support one another as we work toward a world based on love, equity, justice, and beauty.
Author Teju Cole wrote this morning: “The arc of the moral universe retreats and advances like a samba.” He meant the moral arc, of course, a thing that Dr. King said bent toward justice.
The arc of justice is long. We can keep bending it toward love. Let’s be a lever.
(With your help, I may even get my Anarcho-Socialist Utopia some day.)