The Long Road Out of Prejudice
June 29, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
Speaking at Spirit of Life UU in Odesa, FL re Pride Week
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 5th 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.
