Be Proud of How God Made You

I’ve been thinking about that because this month is Pride Month. As a nation, this is the 24th year we’ve celebrated this commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. President Bill Clinton issued the first executive order declaring June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, and ten years later, President Barack Obama changed the name to make it more inclusive: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Pride Month. Six years after that, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage in the Obergefell v Hodges case.

Our brothers and sisters and others in the LGBTQ+ community have made great strides since then, but the reality is that far too many of them were condemned by the ones who raised them, and even kicked out or abandoned. In my commentary for Georgia Public Broadcasting last week, I pointed out that the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides services for LGBTQ young people, did a study in 2021. It showed that twenty-eight percent of LGBTQ youth have been homeless or experienced unstable housing and fourteen percent of queer young people reported that their parents had kicked them out or abandoned them because they were gay or bisexual or transgender.