Tag Archives ⇒ duty

In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out ‘Was An Absolute Necessity’

January 7, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Wow, this should be inter­est­ing! The pod­cast series intro is all we have so far but this NPR piece is dish­ing some of the details of what we’ll hear when this episode airs:

Despite the risks, Rustin felt it was his respon­si­bil­i­ty to be open about his sex­u­al­i­ty. He traces that duty back to an expe­ri­ence he had as a black man in the 1940s Jim Crow South, when he took his place at the back of a seg­re­gat­ed bus.

“As I was going by the sec­ond seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring neck­tie I was wear­ing and pulled it,” he recalled in the new­ly released audio. “Where­upon its moth­er said, ‘Don’t touch a n*****.’ ”

As Rustin tells it, here’s what ran through his mind in that moment after the white woman called him the slur: “If I go and sit qui­et­ly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so inno­cent of race rela­tions that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down qui­et­ly that it’s going to end up say­ing, ‘They like it back there, I’ve nev­er seen any­body protest against it.’ ” 

Rustin was fired from his work with orga­ni­za­tions like the Fel­low­ship of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and he often had to work semi-anonymously behind the scenes. The famous March on Wash­ing­ton that we remem­ber for Mar­tin Luther King Jr.‘s speech was Rustin’s idea.

One of his catch-phrases in speech­es was that we should “speak truth to pow­er.” When he worked with the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee to write the famous 1955 pam­phlet of that name, not only was­n’t he not list­ed as one of the authors, but the oth­ers con­coct­ed some ridicu­lous sto­ry about the phrase being some ancient Quak­er say­ing. Shame­ful. I real­ly want to lis­ten to his sto­ry and can’t wait for the podcast!

https://​www​.npr​.org/​2​0​1​9​/​0​1​/​0​6​/​6​8​2​5​9​8​6​4​9​/​i​n​-​n​e​w​l​y​-​f​o​u​n​d​-​a​u​d​i​o​-​a​-​f​o​r​g​o​t​t​e​n​-​c​i​v​i​l​-​r​i​g​h​t​s​-​l​e​a​d​e​r​-​s​a​y​s​-​c​o​m​i​n​g​-​o​u​t​-​w​a​s​-​a​n​-​a​b​s​o​?​f​b​c​l​i​d​=​I​w​A​R​3​e​U​S​v​E​9​R​s​H​V​j​g​Q​U​3​z​C​m​D​s​6​z​4​9​b​I​u​K​3​i​j​T​t​1​J​B​z​n​V​7​B​V​z​p​e​k​H​7​G​2​k​w​C​m2c

Spiritual Biodiversity and Religious Inevitability

August 2, 2011
· Martin Kelley
Emi­grants from the Irish pota­to famine, via Wikipedia

Peo­ple some­times get pret­ty worked up about con­vinc­ing each oth­er of an mat­ter of press­ing impor­tance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat our­selves loud enough and often enough the obvi­ous­ness of our posi­tion will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we hap­pen to wear down the oppo­si­tion so much that they with­draw from our com­pan­ion­ship or fel­low­ship, all the bet­ter, as we’ve achieved a pati­na of uni­ty. Reli­gious lib­er­als are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the val­ues we hold when talk­ing about the nat­ur­al world. There we talk about bio­di­ver­si­ty. We don’t cheer when a species mal­adapt­ed to the human-driven Anthro­pocene dis­ap­pears into extinc­tion. Just because a plant or ani­mal from the oth­er side of the world has no nat­ur­al preda­tors does­n’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Sci­en­tists tell us that bio­di­ver­si­ty is not just a kind of do-unto-others val­ue that sat­is­fies our sense of nos­tal­gia; hav­ing wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adap­ta­tion is need­ed in response to mas­sive habi­tat stress. Monocrops are good for the annu­al har­vest but leave us espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble when phy­toph­tho­ra infes­tans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups to have dif­fer­ent val­ues, both from us us and from one anoth­er. There are pres­sures in today’s cul­ture to lev­el all of our dis­tinc­tives down so that we have no unique iden­ti­ty. Some cheer this monocrop­ping of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our reli­gious val­ues are some­how truer or more valu­able than those of oth­er peo­ple, then they will even­tu­al­ly spread them­selves – not by push­ing oth­er bod­ies to be like us, but by attract­ing the mem­bers of the oth­er bod­ies to join with us.

God may have pur­pose in fel­low­ships that act dif­fer­ent­ly that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitabil­i­ty that we for­get to share our­selves with those with whom we differ.