The Continuing Struggle for Human Rights

January 9, 2000

When I was a youngster growing up in Maine in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, there was not much in my idyllic surroundings to prepare me for the nightly images of violence which TV projected into my home. It was true that I didn’t know any "Negroes," as African Americans were known back then, but I remember that this lack of first-hand knowledge was often given by others in my community as an excuse for the violence against them . Not knowing "those people" was a kind of cryptic justification for racist attacks. Never mind that most of my neighbors didn’t know any black folk, either.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a particularly threatening Negro because of the different image he projected to curious children like me. If King was a representative of "those" people," my childish logic figured, could they really be so bad? How could they deserve the terrible treatment I was observing on the nightly news? What was the source of such cruelty?

There were not many answers to my mostly unspoken questions, and in spite of my wider experience of human nature these many years later, there still aren’t. Fortunately for me, however, there was at least one place in my community where a different view of the struggles taking place down south could be found. At the Unitarian church where I grew up and attended Sunday School, my doubts and questionings about the plight of African Americans began to find some answers. My sense that their treatment was not right and could not be morally justified were confirmed in the teachings of my church. The church and my young minister became an island of reason in regard to the great civil rights struggle taking place. I liked my church--perhaps "respected" is a better word--and I was naive enough to take it seriously: a trait that in my cynical middle age I sometimes worry that I am losing.

I was interested in religious questions from an early age, and I was impressed that the most prominent black leader of the day happened to be a minister. Even though I was a liberal Unitarian, I knew that this struggle was at some level a religious struggle, and that the Bible and its Christian teaching was one of its most potent weapons.

Those were confusing times for a little boy from Maine, but as much as anything I believe that they were important in charting the future course of my life and of my belief in the power of the institutional church.

During high school, I lost contact with my church. It wasn’t until I started college in 1969 that my interest in religion resurfaced, again because of the different view that the church took of current events such as the Vietnam War and civil rights. It was at this time that I became aware of the role of the church in providing abortion counseling and access to abortion services prior to the legalization of abortion in 1973. I even attended meetings about this issue at the Arlington Street Church in Boston, and began to reclaim my Unitarian Universalist identity.

I was not very worldly-wise when I entered college in 1969. But during my first year at Boston University I became aware of a group known as the Wilde-Stein Club. I soon learned that it was a social and support group for male and female homosexuals. The term "gay" had not yet achieved common usage. The Wilde-Stein Club was named for Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein, two famous--or infamous, depending on your perspective--homosexuals.

The late Victorian Wilde, a poet, novelist, and dramatist from Ireland, had been bitterly persecuted and imprisoned for his homosexuality, a cruel act which probably cost him his health, and ultimately his life. Gertrude Stein was a well-known literary mentor of the early twentieth century.

The Wilde-Stein Club was subject to much ridicule, but to me it was an eye-opener that it even existed.

The only homosexuals I knew up until that time were two men who lived together in my hometown. One of these men had grown up there. Everyone in town knew that they were "queer," the term then derogatorily used to designate gays.

Interestingly, however, this couple seemed to meet with a significant level of acceptance in town. Perhaps it was in part the "devil you know is better than the devil you don’t" attitude at work in our small town.

As a child, I took art lessons from one of the men, about whom I remember nothing extraordinary. I enjoyed my art lessons and even dreamed of becoming an artist myself one day. I certainly suffered no lasting damage from this early encounter with "the homosexual lifestyle." And as I look back, I am thankful that my parents encouraged me to take those art lessons with a man they surely knew to be homosexual.

In the summer of 1970, between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I met another artist, a young man with whom I established a close friendship. One day he told me that he loved me. I confess that I was unprepared for this expression of love, and, lacking the maturity to deal with it, I simply stopped seeing my friend. (Perhaps if I had had the opportunity as a youngster to participate in the UUA’s new sexuality curriculum I could have handled this episode more lovingly and knowledgeably than I did.)

Several years later, more secure in my own sexuality and less vulnerable to negative stereotypes of homosexuality, an opportunity to share a house with this man and another brought us together again as housemates. The three of us, two straight and one gay, spent a perfectly normal six months living together as friends.

Again, I had reason to be grateful for my religious upbringing, which I believe saved me from a debilitating prejudice against my friend. And I was becoming aware of the role that the Unitarian Universalist Church was beginning to play in the new movement for gay rights. I was thankful for a religious faith which challenged me to overcome my discomfort with persons different from myself. I remembered the Wilde-Stein Club, and began to realize that there were whole worlds out there that I knew little about.

In 1979 I entered Harvard Divinity School at what I now realize was the beginning of another revolution. This revolution is ongoing and has to do with the experience of women. It is a revolution which has challenged and continues to challenge the assumptions and habits of us men. From this struggle I have learned much about my male patterns of behavior and thought. It has made me rethink as well the quality of my acceptance of homosexuality and of my rejection of racism. I have come to recognize more clearly that it is not enough simply to believe in these causes, but that one must finally act out of those beliefs. This is never an easy task, and I still have a long way to go.

Alex Haley, the author of Roots, once wrote a little book entitled A Different Kind of Christmas which reminds us that the struggle for human rights is long and arduous and that it is never over. His book tells the story of a young southern white man’s confrontation with racism in the form of slavery and his struggle of conscience and eventual conversion to abolitionist sentiments. The story doesn’t end there, however: for this young man decides to act on his newfound conviction. He joins the Underground Railroad, and is sent home to his native North Carolina for his first assignment. It turns out to be about as difficult as one can imagine: to aid in the escape of a dozen slaves, including several owned by his wealthy family. It is the story of a sacrifice most of us are still unwilling to make.

The struggle for human rights continues. In recent years we have witnessed genocide on a massive scale in places as diverse as Cambodia, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia. We have heard this genocide called by a truly disgusting euphemism: "ethnic cleansing" is murder by any other name.

Our own religious relatives in the Unitarian Church in Romania, where our Partner Church minister Zsolt Jacob and his wife Borika live and work, were exposed to the violence of ethnic cleansing during the regime of Nicolai Ceausescu. One of Ceausescu’s goals before his ouster in 1989 was to wipe out all traces of Hungarian culture within Romania, a policy which he had already begun to carry out. [Transylvanian Unitarians are ethnically Hungarian.]

At the same time there have been politically and economically motivated abuses of human rights just south of our border in war-torn Central America. In many of these struggles, our collective American hands have not been clean. We have welcomed movements toward democracy in some countries, while impeding them in others, depending upon our interests. Just as I have become increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of my own practice in relation to the questions of race, sexual orientation, and women’s rights, so must we all struggle to become aware of the hypocrisy of many of our political motivations in the world beyond our borders.

All these struggles, which are really one struggle--the universal struggle for human rights--remind me again of what has always drawn me to the church. It is still the institution which, for all its human shortcomings, for all its own hypocrisy and resistance to change, has often been on the cutting edge in the continuing struggle for human rights. Too often, true, it has been part of the problem, and one can certainly see this in many contemporary issues. But the church, for all of that, still stands at its core for something deeper, something which is over against the usual ways of the world.

For it still stands for goodness and mercy, for justice and righteousness, for kindness and forgiveness and acceptance. One could very carefully say that it still stands for God. Not that we fully understand or agree upon what these abstractions really mean, but that at the least the church always challenges us to be better than we are.

As much as possible, I want my church to be an island of reason in the face of waves of irrational prejudice. I want it to be an island of kindness in a sea of cruelty and oppression, an island of acceptance in an ocean of rejection.

I sincerely wish that our churches were more racially integrated, and we need to continue to search diligently for the reasons they are not. But I am proud of the progress that we have made in making our churches places where gay and lesbian people are openly welcomed and accepted. We need to remind ourselves of the progress we have made, but we can never rest on our laurels.

I am abundantly aware of my own failures to speak up in the face of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Like most of us, I don’t take enough active interest in what happens "out there" in the rest of the world. But I give thanks that my Unitarian Universalist upbringing planted a seed of discomfort with the way things are deep inside of me. I know on an intimately personal level how much work is still left to be done, and how far I fail in doing it. I need the constant challenge which my religious worldview provides.

I truly believe that we have a tremendous capacity for change, and, despite discouragements, I believe that we have an equally tremendous capacity for love. I believe there is hope for us yet!

We are on this planet only a brief time. There is plenty of suffering in life without the additional suffering that we human beings add to the recipe. As the French poet and philosopher Amiel once wrote, "Life is short, and we never have too much time for gladdening the hearts of those traveling the dark journey with us. O, be swift to love, make haste to be kind." May it be so with each of us, toward all we meet, but especially toward those who challenge us to be the better people we long to be.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock