I'll be home alone today since Tim is going to be spending the day with my Bro. So it's laundry and housecleaning for me.
It's days like these that make me prone to deep philosophical insights. For those of you who don't know, I'm a witch. I've had training in two traditions, one of which I am the co-founder of and I'm currently assisting some friends in their new coven as well. I have a private student and boy is she amazing and one of the sweetest people on the planet.
For the most part I have surrounded myself with people who are kind and giving and accepting of myself and everyone else who stands outside of societal norms. For example, I have a prison ministry. I first started out in a prison that had mostly sex offenders. Generally sex offenders are put in protective segregation because of the danger to them from other inmates. There were so many in this facility that they WERE the general population. It is never easy to love people like that and minister to them in a deep and meaningful way but somehow I managed to do that. I always knew what my students were incarcerated for but when you are in a circle and that circle is formed in "Perfect Love and Perfect Trust" you learn to get over yourself pretty quick. For me, it was not that I had perfect love and perfect trust in the inmates, but I did have perfect love and perfect trust in the Lord and Lady. Only once in the 4 years that I was inside those walls was I ever disrespected by an inmate. I asked him to leave and not come back until he apologized. (He did 2 months later) But I never felt unsafe or intimidated by any of them and trust me some of those guys were SCARY!! I miss each and every one of them too. You wanna talk about perfect love? love the unloveables.
Many people in the LGBT community enjoy being in the Pagan community. Many of them are deeply spiritual and have no place to go since so many of the mainstream religions have locked the doors on them. I think that's kind of sad really. I recently watched a tv show, Our America with Lisa Ling. A great show that had the founder of Exodus apologizing to the folks that were harmed by his "pray the gay away ministry". I think he was sincere in his apology. You can always tell by the eyes you know. And I actually kind of respect the man for doing that. It has to be hard being part of a mainstream religion and being gay at the same time. I never understood their hatred of gay people. Their willingness to quote a few verses in the old testament while ignoring all the ones in the new testament, just kind of blows me away. Their willingness to focus on the breakdown of the family unit but do nothing as people live on the street or shelters, have no medical care and every day children, the elderly, the mentally unsound are abused and taken advantage of...sometimes to death. Somehow in their mind, gay people are the abomination. It doesn't look that way from here.
With the end of DOMA and same sex marriage being re-instituted in California, its nice to see that the federal government understands the word "fair". I always tell my students that Justice is about balance. you always see Lady Justice with balanced scales. Justice is ensuring that the damaged party is made whole...they can't be enriched but they must be made whole. The defeat of those two measures did just that. It brought a measure of justice to those same sex couples who had been denied what every heterosexual couple got...recognition and respect for their marriage.
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