27 June 2023
June is Pride month. According to the Library of Congress, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQI+) Pride Month is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. This uprising sparked a movement to defend the inherent dignity of those who identify as LGBTQI+ and to secure equality, liberty and justice for communities of people who have been reviled, mistreated, discriminated against, abused and killed.
According to Matt Nightingale, the spiritual director for the Christian Closet, when LGBTQIA+ people and their friends, families and allies celebrate Pride month, they are not celebrating pride that is harmful. He explains, “We are embracing the reality that we are who we are. We are rejecting the lies that have told us we don’t belong, that we are somehow abnormal or sick or sinful. We are refusing to live in shame any longer.”
As President Joe Biden explained in 2021, “Pride is both a jubilant communal celebration of visibility and a personal celebration of self-worth and dignity. This Pride Month, we recognize the valuable contributions of LGBTQI+ individuals across America, and we reaffirm our commitment to standing in solidarity with LGBTQI+ Americans in their ongoing struggle against discrimination and injustice.”
“Dignity” is a word often used in speeches and sermons, but not fully understood in its importance and application to the civil society in which we live. “Pride month” could easily be named “Dignity month” because “dignity” is a term that captures the inherent value of our humanity no matter how one might identify themselves in the LGBTQI+ rainbow.
As a society, our social contract requires a shared commitment to the preservation of human dignity. Human dignity means that an individual or group feels self-respect and self-worth. It is concerned with physical and psychological integrity and empowerment. Human dignity is harmed by unfair treatment premised upon personal traits or circumstances that do not relate to individual needs, capacities or merits. It is enhanced by laws that are sensitive to the needs, capacities and merits of different individuals, taking into account the context underlying their differences.
Human dignity is harmed when individuals and groups are marginalized, ignored or devalued, and is enhanced when laws recognize the full place of all individuals and groups. From a Christian perspective, human dignity originates from God and is of God because we are made in God’s own image and likeness (Gn 1:26-27). Human life is sacred because the human person is the most central and clearest reflection of God among us. Every human being is created as God’s image just as they are. (Carmen Joy Imes, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters (IVP Academic, Downers Grove, Illinois 2023). Imago Dei is our human identity, and it cannot be lost or destroyed. This understanding of being God’s image is the starting point for how we answer questions such as who am I and why do I exist.
Human beings have transcendent worth and value that comes from God; this dignity is not based on any human quality, legal mandate or individual merit or accomplishment. Human dignity is inalienable — that means it is an essential part of every human being and is an intrinsic quality that can never be separated from other essential aspects of the human person.
In essence, a basic tenet of our society is a shared commitment to the values of fairness, respect and tolerance so that we can live and thrive peacefully with one another without fear of being coerced by big brother type authority into acting in a manner inconsistent with our beliefs and convictions.
Unfortunately, Pride month has become a major battle ground in our nation’s ongoing culture wars, wherein traditional religious values concerning sex, sexuality, gender identity and expression are being pitted against a progressive expansion of human rights. Regrettably, much of the backlash is driven by the conservative evangelical community of which I am a member and a leader.
Ironically, many of the arguments conservative evangelicals are making to oppose LGBTQI+ rights are the same arguments that many opponents to the church make to limit religious liberty and discriminate against communities of faith. In so doing, conservative evangelicals are neglecting the golden rule theologically and politically, while unwittingly undermining the protections that have historically been afforded them against discrimination, abuse and persecution.
Since our nation’s inception, individuals from various religious backgrounds have too often suffered discrimination simply because of their religious beliefs. The fight to preserve religious liberty has long been closely aligned with the civil rights movement. The rights of people to identify as LGBTQI+ are akin to the right of religious liberty because the rights being asserted by both are rights rooted in conscience, belief, theology and identity. The fundamental questions we grapple with such as who we are and why we exist are shared questions with a wide array of answers that deserve to be heard, respected, protected and celebrated.
The biblical golden rule, “For whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, that do you unto them,” guided early Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania colony William Penn on the issue of religious freedom in a way it had guided few others before him. The verse from Matthew served as the introductory quotation to Penn’s seminal “Great Case of Liberty of Conscience,” where he laid out his beliefs on freedom of conscience.
Said Penn, “No people can be truly happy, though under the greatest enjoyments of civil liberties, if abridged of the Freedom of their Conscience as to their Religious Profession and Worship.” (Pennsylvania Charter of Liberties, 1701)
The freedom of conscience is the cornerstone of peace in a world with many competing philosophies. It gives us all space to determine for ourselves what we think and believe — to follow the truth as we understand it.
It allows diverse beliefs to coexist, protects the vulnerable and helps us negotiate our conflicts. This freedom is not merely what political philosophers have referred to as the “negative” freedom to be left alone, however important that may be. Rather, it is a much richer “positive” freedom — the freedom to live in accordance with how we identify and how we believe in a legal, political and social environment that is tolerant, respectful and accommodating.
One of the hallmarks of our nation, which is made up of many peoples from different backgrounds and religious traditions, has been our ability to come together as one. In celebrating Pride month, we are celebrating the vindication and preservation of human dignity. Just like religious liberty, the liberties of those who identify as LGBTQI+ are being celebrated and advocated for are rooted in our shared dignity as human beings.
However, our civil liberties should not be used as a sword to inflict violence on the rights of others. Rather our civil liberties are a shield to protect our collective dignity regardless of what we believe and how we identify. The debates we have had and continue to have in civil society about who we love and marry, which bathroom a person should use, when a person should have access to gender transition health care, how and when people are allowed to compete in gender specific sporting events and every other debate involving LGBTQI+ should start and end with a shared commitment to the recognition and preservation of the shared dignity of the human beings who are seeking to be included as equals in society.
Recently, the Nevada Legislature’s passage and Gov. Joe Lombardo’s signing of SB163 was an example of focused care and attention to the protection of the human dignity interest at stake when people with gender dysphoria and gender incongruence seek health care. It would have been easy to tow the party line and veto the bill. But, by his action, the governor appears to have set aside the politics and embraced the people behind the policy who were simply asking to be seen, heard and treated equally relative to the health care available to them.
Pride month presents an opportunity to reflect and lament the fears and prejudices we have allowed to affect how we speak about and treat one another relative to what other people believe and how they identify in our community, while at the same time leaning into our shared humanity with those who are different from us to overcome bigotry and hate. Some people pejoratively call this being “woke.” But, I prefer to call this “loving my neighbor.”
Given the violent state of the world in which we live and the unrelenting vitriol of those engaged in a struggle for power and control over civil society, we should not take our liberty and shared dignity for granted. As you head out into the community today look around, take note of the diversity in the people you see and understand that the diversity you see represents the highest aspirations of humanity. This diversity is not a threat to be vanquished by force, but a strength to be celebrated with a “pride” that has the potential to transform us into a more perfect union.
Jason D. Guinasso is the managing partner of law firm Hutchison & Steffen’s office in Reno. He is a litigator and trial attorney who also maintains an appellate practice, which includes petitions for judicial review of administrative decisions, extraordinary writs, and appeals to the Nevada Supreme Court. He also is legal counsel for the Reno/Fernley Crisis Pregnancy Center and an associate pastor at Ministerio Palabra de Vida where he serves a diverse multicultural church.
The post Celebrate Pride month and human dignity appeared first on The Nevada Independent.