Birthright
June ends with unabated clamoring for justice. Pent up by social isolation, an army of protesters vents in streets and squares. Equality, NOW! Lit by the murder of George Floyd, we face African Americans entrenched in attitudes and structures that are at best oppressive. The steely gaze illumines our complicity.
Behind banners of Black Lives Matter fly rainbow flags. Straining to draw parallels between empowering an ethnic group enslaved once and still by myriad tyrants, LGBT+ activists clamor for social recognition. Heterosexism replaces white privilege as the enemy. And America answers with the biggest victory yet for the sexually ‘diverse’—a court ruling two weeks ago that redefined sexual nature as whatever one thinks and feels it to be.
Persons still inclined to reason amid the clamor may wonder why the two strains of protest—one seeking freedom from insidious slavery, the other for enslaving lives with a host of ‘selves’ that result in sexual suicide—can peacefully intermingle. In truth, they cannot. The answer is simple and radical, rooted in our Creator. We are born male and female. Human happiness lies in making peace with our bodies and in overcoming attitudes and behaviors to the contrary. African Americans are born and blessed by God with an ethnicity that commands full rights and privileges on par with any other race. Dignity demands reason: it directs us to clear out any shadow cast on one’s ethnic birthright and on one’s sexual birthright.
As for the latter, at risk of offending Gaga, you were not born that way. You just lost your way in a pandemic of sexual confusion fanned by the Supreme Court.
Around the corner from me is Troost, an 11-mile avenue that demarks the institutionalized racism of my town, Kansas City, the ninth most segregated city in the USA. 2000 of us prayed there last week to repent of how we contributed to the Troost wound, a street that divides blacks from whites in a shameful historic effort to fund good white neighborhoods and schools and to let African Americans work it out for themselves. West of Troost are tony tidy homes; eastward lie mostly African American neighborhoods which struggle for equality and opportunity. Two of my kids live and teach in schools there. They embody the truth that overcoming racism takes more than a prayer. They work to help African Americans recover the dignity of their birthright.
Just after the Troost prayer, I left for our training in Kansas City Kansas where 60 brave persons gathered to reclaim the beauty and power of their birthright, made in His image as male or female. Jesus loves that. He comes quickly for persons seeking to become who the Father made them to be. Amid the clamor for justice, we need each other more than ever to stay true. Our confusion should be clearer than ever. When we lump justice for ethnic birthright with empowering sexually broken ‘selves’, we trivialize the real wound still bleeding in African-Americans and further distance the LGBT+ set from making peace with their birthright.
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