Lifting Me Up

From Douglas Hallward-Dreimeier, an attorney whose arguments helped sway the Supreme Court to rule in favor of same-sex marriage in 2015:  

“On the day of the argument, there was a moment in the courtroom when all of a sudden I felt, in a way that I never have in any other argument, the weight of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of couples, and their families and friends, and I sort of seized up… And I had to go through a process.  The process that I went through was thinking: no, it’s not those individuals and their wants and lives weighing on me.  It’s all those peoples’ hopes and prayers and wishes lifting me up.  And I actually thought of two former ministers from Westmoreland… who I knew were out on the steps of the Supreme Court praying for me.  Knowing that they and so many others were lifting me up and holding me up in their prayers was critical to my ability to get up and to make the argument that morning.

Many times during the course of my involvement in the fight for marriage equality, I came back to a poem that I had once heard, by Edwin Markham. It’s entitled, “Outwitted.”  

He drew a circle and shut me out.  Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.  

But love and I had the wit to win.  We drew a circle that took him in.

For too long, our society has drawn lines and circles that shut out LGBTQ people, treating them as heretics, rebels, as things to flout.  In my re-imagining of Markham’s poem, God is love, and God and we, though faith, had the wit to win.  And we did so, as God would have it, by drawing the circle wide, to embrace all God’s children.” 

– Excerpts of a sermon given at Rock Spring Congregational UCC on 7/16/17. Hallward-Dreimeier, worships at Westmoreland United Church of Christ and is managing partner of Ropes & Gray’s DC office and leads the firm’s appellate and Supreme Court practice.

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Informed by Empathy

From And the Spirit Moved Them by Helen LaKelly Hunt, Feminist Press (New York, 2017)

(This excerpt from p. 6 refers to integrated meetings of women abolitionists in the 1830’s)

Focusing on the issues of slavery, the abolitionist feminists practiced empathy at their weekly sewing circles, learning “sympathy for the slave,” which became a key tenet of their movement.  While the women were sewing, each took a turn standing up to read a passage from a slave narrative.  They struggled to put themselves in a position to feel what it was like to be auctioned off and owned, to be separated from one’s children or parents or spouse.  “Let every slaveholder apply these queries to his own heart,” Angelina Grimke challenged them. “Am I willing to be a slave?  Am I willing to see my mother a slave, or my father, my sister or my brother?” This is one of the many ways the women strove to make their organization personal, relational, and informed by empathy.

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Optimism is a Political Act

(Excerpts from Alex Steffen, "The Politics of Optimism", Medium.com, Nov. 2016) Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful — cynicism is obedience. Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics. Great movements for social change always begin with statements of great optimism.