Martin Luther King Jr. Day

I know that any time a middle-aged white guy talks about Martin Luther King Jr. it can come across a bit like the phrase “I have a black friend.”

That’s part of the reason this wasn’t highlighted. I want to do everything I can for it not to feel like me trying to virtue signal or use the memory of someone for gain. But I also think it’s important that people who look like me acknowledge what he’s done for us as well.

Let me be clear. There is no comparison to be made between the cost of being racist and the cost to someone who has it directed at them. But that doesn’t mean that the civil rights movement didn’t improve my life.

First and most importantly, hate and fear suck. Have you ever looked at someone who is terrified of brown people and thought, wow, he must be having a great time? I bet his home life is just wonderful.

Of course not. But when I look at those people, what I think is, “There but for the grace of God go I.” And in this case, the intervention of God that is most responsible for helping me to move towards love is Dr. King.

I grew up in ‘the church’ and by that I mean a right-wing evangelical authoritarian church. The marginally less vile version of the ones we see now defending shooting innocent women in the head because they were disrespectful to the police, and I have a lot of wonderful memories and even friends from that time. But there was a lot of darkness too and based on the times when I’m imprudent enough to go onto facebook and see what they’re doing that darkness has gotten worse.

And I wasn’t on the fringes. Most weeks I went to church twice on Sunday and on Wednesday night, and that was when I wasn’t preparing for mission trips. I also went to a Christian school where on my first day I was asked, “How do you make abortions illegal?” and told that every person who was gay was gay because they were sexually abused.

There weren’t a lot of cracks in that shield. And while the racism was less overt, the racism was there too. One of those cracks was Star Trek, which is why I love it and always will. It got me into science fiction because I got to see truth and was drawn to it.

Another was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And while Star Trek was a constant companion that taught me to think logically, the thing that started a journey out of that darkness that took me far too long to take was a simple question I asked myself.

I was watching some of Dr. King’s speeches. At that age, his birthday had just become a holiday, and so it might have been because of that. But for whatever reason, the simple question came to me. And the way I phrased it to myself gives you a clue to how much I had to learn.

I said, ‘If the civil rights movement were still happening, who would it be fighting for?”

If you’re thinking of the ‘are we the baddies?” meme, then you’re getting there faster than I did. But I got there. I realized that there were clearly groups that were being marginalized and oppressed and that the people surrounding me were openly telling me to hate them. (Just so you don’t think I’m trying to make myself look good, at that point I would have told you that racism didn’t really exist anymore.)

To say that I was homophobic at the time would be mild. I remember one day I went to a cafe with my cousin, and I got it into my head that people might think we were gay. Perhaps someone did. But I remember feeling the desperate need to leave immediately and was uncomfortable enough that 30 years later I still remember it.

But somehow it still struck me that if there were a civil rights movement, and if I wanted to be on the right side of it, then I needed to support gay people. It was as simple as that. Except I had no idea what that meant. I knew it meant being kind, but it was mostly it’s none of my business. And , ‘well what if they’re just celibate.’ is that really a sin.

But I really was trying, and with each hateful thing said about them it became harder for me to ignore. Eventually I had to leave the Church for years, reexamine everything I had ever believed, move away from most of the people I grew up with, and watch Donald Trump be elected president before I was fully willing to speak out loud what I had known for a long time. The church I grew up in was an angry and authoritarian nightmare that hurt far more people than it helped, and even though they were kind to me and even helped our family many times, it didn’t make the harm they were doing ok.

But somehow I didn’t fully lose my faith. Perhaps that’s a good thing; perhaps it’s not. But one thread, and they were threads, was the words of Reverend King. I reminded myself countless times that ‘darkness can not drive out darkness’ when I saw people I respected, or even myself, resorting to the type of hate that is still spread is too much of the Church.

And on this day I think it’s important for me to remember that if I had been in Birmingham, Selma or Montgomery, I can’t honestly say I would have been on the right side. Not when I was that age. And now I still fear that all too often I’ll be remembered for being a silent friend. That I’m sitting at home writing on the internet while laws are passed to target already marginalized people.

But what I know is that by fighting to make the type of hate and fear that we still see unacceptable, Dr. King helped to create a path for me to find my way out of darkness, and my life is far better for it.