The Long Road Out of Prejudice

The Long Road Out of Prejudice  

June 29, 2025    Dr. Roger Ray

 

Speaking at Spirit of Life UU in Odesa, FL re Pride Week

 

click here to see the video

 

I want to thank you for the invitation to speak here today. I am a fairly recent transplant to Florida as it was just over a year ago that I joined the migration of old people who are sick and tired of putting up with winter weather and headed south. I joined the UU church that is around the block from my home in Vero Beach where I found about a dozen other retired ministers who were there for the same reason that I am. I am speaking there next Sunday, there are so many of us that it has taken a year for it to be my turn to fill in for Rev. Tom, I hope that I get another crack at your pulpit before it is my turn in Vero Beach again!

 

When I was invited to speak here, I was reminded that it is Pride Month and the suggestion was made that I try to mention that theme, which really took me on a flood of memories. When I was still a denominational pastor in the Christian Church, I was called to a big church in Springfield, Missouri in 1991. The city was still embroiled in a controversy sparked by a play performed at the local state university called, The Normal Heart, that delt with AIDS and the LGBTQ+ community. At my very first board meeting, an elderly lady on the board, ironically, a woman who shared her home with another adult woman for her entire life, rose to demand of me, “Just what are you going to do about the homosexual problem?” 

 

I had only been in town for a week, but I knew this question wasn’t just about the public controversy. I knew that the unspoken challenge had to do with the rumor that the church’s associate pastor was gay. The major theme of the next ten years of my life were mapped out in that moment. My decision that night to do whatever I had to do to protect Rev. Charlie from the lynching I saw in the eyes of several board members led me into a years-long circuit of speaking engagements in university and seminary classes, along with TV and radio interviews, and newspaper columns, about religion and sexual orientation. 

 

All of us who are straight supporters of gay rights, have a story to tell about how own journey out of the prejudice that we were probably reared with and the steps we had to take to escape the prison of prejudice, and I would love to hear your stories but today, oddly enough, I have the microphone. 

 

I grew up in the Christian Church in the little county seat town of Glasgow, KY. I do not recall the issue of homosexuality being mentioned at all until I was a college student. The prejudice that was a part of daily conversation in my growing up years was racial prejudice and so, with your permission, I would like to start there by sharing a story with you that I heard the late Fred Craddock tell at a conference in Texas over 40 years ago. Fred was a famous preacher in those days and as a storyteller, you can generally assume that his stories were not historically factual but, as it turns out, they were still true.

 

He told us about a little boy named Jimmy, who lived in a little Texas town where it happened that all of the little boys his age that he played with in the neighborhood were black. It was a bit uncomfortable for his white parents, but he was just a kid and kids are going to play, so they never said anything about it.

Jimmy was unique, as kids go, because Jimmy loved going to church. He loved the stained-glass windows, he loved the way the pipe organ made their old oak pews vibrate, he loved the choir processing in their colorful robes. He loved everything about it, from the women in hats and gloves, right down to the preacher’s sweaty red face when he got all tuned up. 

 

The only thing that bothered him about church was that his friends couldn’t come with him. They were always sitting on the church steps, waiting for Jimmy to come out and play, but Jimmy just couldn’t understand why his friends couldn’t come inside with him. The subject came up at Sunday dinner almost every week when Jimmy would demand an explanation: Daddy, why can’t my friends come to church with me? You are too young to understand, it’s just the way things are. But Daddy, couldn’t they come, just once? Hush up now son, eat your dinner before it gets cold.

 

One week, there was funeral at the church and, as always, Jimmy was there. And he saw all of the people at the funeral who were not usually at his church and so that night, at dinner, he asked: Daddy, when I die, can my friends come to my funeral? 

What are you talking about son, you are not going to die. 

No, no, Daddy, tell me, when I die, can my friends come to my funeral? 

Hush up boy, you are upsetting your mother! 

Daddy, I need to know, can my friends come to my funeral?

Well, I suppose so, but let it go now, we’re eating.

 

The people in town didn’t know . . . was it an accident? Why did Jimmy just run out in front of that truck like that? The town was in shock.

Three days later the church was packed for the funeral, and Jimmy’s little friends were all sitting in the front row of the church when the preacher stood up to deliver the eulogy. He began: I don’t know if it was an accident or if Jimmy ran out in front of that truck on purpose, but I do know this – this town only had one prophet and now he is dead. 

 

You see, the thing about prejudice is that for most people, it is almost entirely unconscious. I grew up in the American Apartheid of segregated schools, churches, restrooms, and water fountains. When I was old enough to turn a bale of hay or set a tobacco plant, I worked on the farm with the black kids of the tenet farmer, but it never even occurred to me that I never saw them in my school or my church. I never thought about it until that day in 5^th grade when eight or nine frightened black kids were escorted into my classroom as integration began in a fog of confusion and fear. 

 

I remember the day when the municipal swimming pool was integrated, and my mother came to pick my brother and me up and she was horrified to see us in the water with black kids. She literally took us home and demanded that we bathe and scrub ourselves hard in case, well, I don’t really know what she was afraid of . . . but it was a hot summer and thank God she got over it. 

 

Prejudice, conscious or unconscious, becomes just a short-hand way of navigating the world. Prejudice doesn’t go away the first time it is challenged. And when you think it is all over, something happens to make you realize that it isn’t over yet. We got through school integration, the integration of the pool, the little league baseball team, department stores and rest rooms. But I was home from college one weekend and watching TV with my family, on the Dick VanDyke show, their college aged son brought his black girlfriend home to meet the TV sitcom family . . . and that’s when I discovered where the reserve of prejudice was hiding in my family. My father turned to me and my brother and told us that if we ever dated a black girl that we would find all of our stuff in the driveway and to not even come in to say goodbye. 

 

Impulsively, I stood up and walked to the phone on the kitchen wall and called Marsha Troutman, the prettiest and blackest young woman I had ever met, and asked her out to dinner. I left to pick her up for dinner and then came home to see if my clothes would be in the driveway. They were not and the subject was never brought up again. 

 

I was infected with racial prejudice. I am only five generations removed from slave traders. It was a part of my family inheritance, but that night, I had decided to break the chain. I am confident that my father died a racist, but he died knowing t hat he had not passed the poison on to me. Before he died, I had adopted a little brown girl from Korea and he had to pretend for 20 years that he liked her, at least a little.

 

I spent 16 years in that church in Missouri, defending Rev. Charlie and other members of the church who were in the LGBTQ community. For more than a decade I was the only Christian pastor in town who conducted same sex weddings before they could be legally recognized. My church wouldn’t let me do them in the church. Even after we had gay elders and deacons and Sunday School teachers. 

 

There were often protestors marching up and down the sidewalk in front of the church. Twice a cinder black was thrown through the windshield of my car during Sunday services. There were death threats and nasty letters.

 

At first I did same sex weddings far out of town, then in restaurants and homes. Once I asked the board, when a gay person donates money to the church, does that go into a different fund or does it get put in the bank with straight donations? 

So, at long last, in 2007, I was permitted to do a same sex wedding in the church and, coincidentally, I was fired three months later. 

 

That board meeting lasted well past midnight and though there were no visible torches and pitchforks, there was a lot of anger emboldened by ignorance. I vowed to never go to church again but thankfully there was the UU church where I could take refuge…. And, as many of my critics assured me, the UU isn’t really a church anyway, is it? The church went into steep decline as they continued to battle internally with what they had done to me. They fired a few more people over the next few years but, in the end, my vindication came when they hired a married gay pastor. 

 

I apologize, I made it sound like I was something like Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves without the help of black prophets…. It wasn’t like that, it wasn’t all me and an awful lot of really fine gay, lesbian, and trans folks paid a much bigger personal price than I did in that slow transformation. 

 

The gist of what I’m saying is that things do get better. There is still racial prejudice in America, but America is not what it was in the 1960’s. 

There is still homophobia in America, but most gay people can now be out and proud without fear of losing their job or their family. 

But we had Roe v Wade in place for 50 years, granting women autonomy over their own bodies, and one summer, just a few years ago, we saw that taken away. We finally won victories in the arena of gay marriage and gay and trans folks serving in the military but already the trans soldiers are being told to pack up and get out. Already we have a Supreme Court Justice wanting to overturn the decision that legalized same sex marriage. 

 

Yes, we have made a lot of progress in the past two generations for women, for minorities, for the LGBTQ+ community, but nothing is certain. We cannot take any of our liberties or successes for granted. 

 

In the past decade, most of my favorite churches have become smaller and weaker, barely holding onto existence, but if ever there was a time when all of our towns needed a prophet, isn’t this that time? Will the prophets come from our churches? Will they be politicians and statesmen? God help me, could it be a child, just a kid who loves his black friends, or his gay uncle, or his pregnant big sister? Who is going to speak up? Who will be a voice for the voiceless? 

I  will close with a few lines from the Irish musician, Theo Bard’s song, “Fickle World of Change”

Can you stand up and be counted as a body in a crowd

Put your name on a petition with your signature so proud

Can you raise your voice so loud as you sand with head unbowed

When they are beating on your brow demanding answers here and now

Cause that’s how you make a difference in this fickle world of change.

 

 

“Radicalized by Basic Decency”

 

  June 1, 2025    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 

My weekday routine is to have a cup of coffee, catch up with the news while I dress to play racquetball and then I head over to my old health club where there are about a half a dozen men who are old enough to remember what racquetball is. We range in age between 50 and 83 and I am not proud so say that my win loss ratio with the 83 year old ex-marine is about 1 to 5. He is amazing. . . and I kinda hate him.

 

But I recently had to call for the club’s security guard to help me with a guy who had become absurdly difficult. The guy in question, when he learned that I am a minister, began to try to talk church business with me and when he learned that I am not a traditional Christian, that I don’t believe in heaven or hell, souls, demons, angels, supernatural theism, nor the Loch Ness Monster, the Tooth Fairy, or, regardless of my appearance, I don’t even believe in Santa Claus, he became enraged.

 

And day after day, he would try to debate me using Biblical quotes and eventually by shouting at me, with a really creepy smile on his face, telling me that I am going to hell. When the other guys tried to get him to leave me alone, he shouted even louder that I was teaching a false gospel and leading people astray. I repeatedly told him that I didn’t want to discuss religion with him, but nothing could seem to stop him. 

When I refused to play with him anymore, he started putting scripture quotes in my gym bag. After several complaints about his harassment, the club finally told them that they would ban him from the club if he bothered me again. 

 

I have lived in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and now Florida, so I have had a lot of exposure to right wing evangelicals and even though I am used to hate mail and even called in and emailed threats from these guys, I have never encountered anyone who was so singularly obsessed with trying to make me afraid of going to his imaginary hell. 

Sadly, this annoying character is neither unique nor rare. He is a man trapped in a prison made entirely out of religious beliefs that have been drilled into him, probably since early childhood. It is a prison composed of absolutes. As I mentioned in my last message, there are religions that have taught people that God will send you to hell if you get a divorce, or if you are gay. Others adamantly insist that you will go to hell unless you are a part of their specific group, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Christ, the Mormons, or, in many instances, the Catholic Church. 

 

My in-laws, decades ago, went to a non-instrumental Church of Christ and they believed that you not only had to be a Christian with all of the dogmatic teachings that usually involves, but you also had to be baptized by immersion, and, if you went to a church that used instrumental music in their services, an organ, a piano, or, God forbid, a guitar or drums, that you would also go to hell for that. How could anyone worship such a petty God? 

 

I was a young philosophy major in college when I gave up on believing in hell. It was simply too absurd to think that any deity could be so cruel and inexcusably mean. But for a whole lot of people, hell poses the threat by which they were taught how to behave. And you mind adapts to the environment in which you are raised. Thankfully, most of us think our way out of that mental prison by many never do. They are not taught not to steal, or lie, or use drugs, or get drunk, or pay for sex because such things are bad for you and reflect a lack of character, they were taught that their morality was rooted in a fear of punishment, eternal punishment, fire and brimstone, agony without end. 

 

And when such a person encounters someone who just refuses to be trapped in that exchange of piety to avoid eternal fire, they are terrified that they might be infected by the “false gospel” that finds such fear to be laughable. 

 

And when you have been taught to stay out of the saloons and brothels lest you be thrown into hell, and you start to think that maybe all of that hell stuff is just made up to control you, then what is there to keep you out of the saloons and brothels? I suspect, for people like my racquetball playing acquaintance, not much at all. It may be that fear is the only thing, in his old age, that has constrained him for decades.

 

Now, this is an extreme case, but for the whole of the church, temple, mosque, and cathedral going public, they are still taught that they world is defined by certain moral absolutes that have come down to them from on high. This is part of what fascinates me about the public attention given to the election of a new Catholic pope, replete with all of the hand wringing about whether he approves of gay marriage or not, will he consider ordaining women, and might he do something crazy, like suggesting that eating meat on Friday is a mortal sin.

 

I can barely keep from yelling at my TV during their around the clock coverage of the new pope that no one can decide for the world if being gay is a sin. No one can rationally say that you have to have a penis to preach, consecrate communion, or baptize someone. I have been baptizing, serving communion, and preaching since 1978 and I have never once used my penis in the process. What on earth are people thinking? And what kind of a genitals obsessed deity would make a rule that allowed morons who were male to preach and keep brilliant, educated women out of the pulpit? Honestly, people should be embarrassed for what surely amounts to blasphemy, if such a thing can actually exit. 

 

My favorite quote from the late Pope Francis was when, in reference to gay relationships, he said, “Who am I to judge?” Yes, Amen! Not the pope, not an imam, not a rabbi or a priest gets to dictate moral absolutes. But the difficult thing for many people who have spent their lives trapped in the mental prison built by religious teachings is, when you step out of that cage, you have no one to give you moral boundaries. 

You have laws. There is the police, there are courts, which are hopefully crafted to protect the well being of society, but on a personal level, the horrifying reality is that you have to decide for yourself. And, like it or not, morality is an ever moving target. 

 

I trust that we can all agree that pedophilia is wrong. Even if they agree to a proposal, no 9-year-old should be allowed to get married. Still, we know that the Prophet Muhammad, in his late 50s, married his third wife, Aisha, when she was 6 years old. Many of his friends told him that it was a bad idea, but it was still done in the 7^th century. Muhammad defended the marriage saying that he did not consummate the marriage until Aisha was 9 but that doesn’t really help much, even though this was more than 1300 years and 8000 miles from us. Many modern Muslims have spun like tops trying to deny the historical fact that Muhammad married a child, but it was accepted for centuries until modern defenders of the faith have tried to silence this historical fact. 

But you might find it even more disturbing to learn that less than 200 years ago, the famous American writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe, at the age of 27 married Virginia Clem who was 13 years old. . . which is made a bit more of a bitter pill to swallow since Virginia was his first cousin. 1836, just not that long ago and not far away at all. It was not uncommon to marry a cousin in the 19^th century, but still, was it wrong?

 

My 18^th century paternal family ran a slave plantation in Kentucky on which they built, for the community, a non-instrumental Church of Christ where it was morally fine to own dozens of slaves but if you played a piano during your Sunday services you would go to hell. Religion can be very funny that way. 

 

In the mid 1990’s I actually got involved in Missouri’s state legislature to amend the state’s crime bill. I was teaching religion at Drury University and learned that one of my students, a 19-year-old woman, was working at a local strip club, and she and her boyfriend were fighting because he, at age 19 was not old enough to go into the club to offer some protection from exploitation. The irony was too much for me. I had recently officiated at the wedding of my state legislator and so I used my contact with him to get an appointment in his office to insist that if a 20 year old man is not old enough to go into a strip club, an 18 year old girl shouldn’t be allowed to give naked lap dances there. It was a small victory and a short lived one as my student assured me that all of her fellow dancers obtained fake IDs and went back to work; but I tried to protect them, even if they didn’t want to be protected.

 

But I hope that you get my point, neither religion nor the law and certainly not a majority public opinion can dictate moral absolutes. I don’t believe that God had had anything to do with the writing of the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran, or the Upanishads. I don’t believe that God rewards piety or punishes sins. But I still don’t use drugs, or get drunk in saloons, or pay for sex. Not because of God, a church, a priest, or even the law, I choose to live by a different moral code because I don’t want to be the kind of person who exploits the vulnerable or puts society at risk, driving under the influence. 

My religion does not demand that I be a good person, I’m religious because I choose to strive to be a good person. God doesn’t create a moral society through religious laws and a threat of judgement; people who want to be good people create religions that might offer guidance, even with a host of mistakes along the way. 

 

There are no hard and fast rules. We have to be willing to enter into dialogue with the moral universe every day. I have been to Honduras often enough that I know that children are used in agriculture there. So, when I see fruit and melons from Honduras in my neighborhood grocery, I refuse to buy it. However, I have an Apple iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad in my hands several hours a day and this sermon was written on an Apple MacBook and I’m pretty sure that child labor and sweat shop conditions were a part of all four of those products coming into my possession and the mere fact that I like them, or are addicted to them, and owning them is legal and everyone else does it . . . . which is pretty much how Muhammad and Edgar Allan Poe justified their marriage choices and how my ancestors justified the uncompensated internship program for African immigrants on their plantation, we all know that ethics is not determined by law, the marketplace, or public opinion. 

 

I might be inclined to try to convince Tim Cook that Apple’s labor practices are wretched, but I’m not willing to give up my Apple products, at least not yet.  And I know that at least some of you are still stuck back five minutes ago when I told you that I tried to set an age limit on when a young woman could be exploited by the sex industry, thinking that if they wanted to work there that it was none of my business. And if you think that, well, you suck but this is a one way form of communication and there isn’t much that either of us can do about that. 

 

I’m saying that if you lack clarity about morality, you do not have a deficiency of religion. You have a deficiency of conscience. And conscience, sadly, is not innate. Having a conscience is a matter of choice and that is a choice which many people simply fail to make. While I have my own failings and hypocrisies, to the extent to which I am a good person, I am a good person only because I was radicalized by basic human decency. 

 

I will have more to say on this topic in my July 6^th message at the Unitarian Church in Vero Beach which will be posted here on July 13^th.