Rev. Deanna Vandiver
Church of the Larger Fellowship Affiliated Minister

The Pink Haven Coalition is actively seeking Unitarian Universalists to offer welcoming villages, to serve as hosts and housing support for internally displaced trans and gender expansive persons and their families. While many calls to action ask for you to write your policy makers or show up for public witness, this is a direct ask for the abolitionist practice of accompaniment.

At a recent meeting with our Unitarian Universalist Association, the chalice lighting shared was this provoking invitation by the glorious Billy Porter,

“I think one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is the positive. Our news cycles are based in the negative. One of the things that I’ve been trying to lean into is the positive. The reason why the pushback is so acute and so severe is because the change has already happened. We have to remember that.
I stand before you as an out black queer artist who’s in the mainstream. The changes already happened. That’s what the pushback is. So let’s celebrate the joy of that.”

Yes. Let’s take a moment together and celebrate the joy of that. Many of us carry the brutal stories of pushback in our beings, AND for this moment, let us give thanks that joy does not wait for the struggle to be over.

It is because Unitarian Universalism honors the inherent dignity and power of all human beings, celebrating the plurality of possibilities with the realm of gender, and creating welcoming congregations that Unitarian Universalists are being explicitly invited to support the abolitionist work of the Pink Haven Coalition.

And yet, our history as welcoming congregations is rather recent on the scale of religious time. It matters that we are accountable to our own struggle to live into the promise of universal love.

David Pohl, who spent twenty-two years with the UU Department of Ministry…recalls helping to place the first two openly gay ministers in UU pulpits in 1980, when Douglas Morgan Strong went to Augusta, Maine and Mark Belletini went to Hayward, California. “I was kind of proud of that,” Pohl said, “proud of working with the churches and search committees that had the courage to make those decisions early on.” (The Premise & The Promise)

Rev. Douglas Morgan Strong’s own recollection of this breakthrough reflects more of the pain than the pride – He wrote “When I went before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, I was petrified. Back then [in 1979], the number of out gay ministers successfully serving congregations was easy to count. There were none.” He lifted up that the General Assembly vote in favor of an Office of Gay Affairs – now housed within the Justice & Inclusion office of the Unitarian Universalist – was by no means unanimous and that many objected vehemently. Strong recalls “one colleague asking the assembly if the next step would be an Office of Bestiality.” (The Premise & The Promise)

Mercy.

It wasn’t that long ago, beloved. We must be humble in our becoming abolition.

And.

“The changes already happened. That’s what the pushback is. So let’s celebrate the joy of that.”

We celebrate the joy and we do not stop showing up for the struggle for collective liberation, an abolitionist future where we turn towards each other in care and treat no one as disposable.

How could anyone ever tell you
you were less than whole?

Many of us have been introduced to the concept of abolition through frameworks based in the negative. Taking a lesson from the wisdom of Billy Porter, let us lean into the positive and turn towards becoming abolition as a project of creation.

“As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis have taught us, abolition is a project of creation. To end criminalization, policing, and prisons, we need to build up life-affirming practices, institutions, and infrastructure that generate care and safety.” – Amanda Alexander & Deanna Van Buren

Universalism proclaims that no one is outside of the love of the holy, that not one soul is disposable, no matter what the legislators decide and police enforce. Whether you are being criminalized because of your identity or because of your poverty, systemic violence requires a faithful response. Becoming abolition is a faithful response.

While a writer in residence at the University of Washington, Madison Snider wrote an elegant essay on The Vigilant Imagination of Abolition. They wrote “The work is a continual, slow burn of justice. Abolition rejects the idea that anyone is disposable and reinstates hope in healing…Engaging in practices of “constant becoming” pave the way toward a world built on a foundation of care rather than harm.”

Snider concludes: What abolitionists have taught me is the value of holding space simultaneously for worldbuilding and radical dismantling. What ultimately must be abolished are the means by which community resources are drained to perpetuate harm and present the community back to itself as unworthy of care…The vigilant imagination of abolition is a confluence of resistance to persistent and evolving forms of oppression and steadfastness in the knowledge that another world is possible.

Another world, a loving world, is possible, dear ones. Together we make it so. Let us commit to becoming abolition and creating together.