“Justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What does it mean to harness love’s power to stop oppression, exclusion, and violence? How do we stand on the side of love, bending the moral arc of the universe towards justice? Those are questions people of faith have been asking for thousands of years. Each of us, in our own day, must try to find and live our own answers.

I was privileged to be the founding director of the Standing on the Side of Love campaign, working closely with Campaign Manager Adam Gerhardstein and Helio Fred Garcia, who took our dream and created a strategic plan. But, ultimately, it was thousands of people like you who brought love’s power into the public debates on issues where, too often, fear and a desire for punishment dominate. So many different kinds of people have said: “Love’s people: Yes, that’s who my people are!”

“As we move forward in the weeks and months ahead, we must do more than express compassion. We must reflect on what conditions make repeated acts of deranged violence possible and take action. The killings we keep witnessing in America are symptoms of a culture that is too tolerant of hatred and too reluctant to restrict access to deadly weapons.”

–UUA President Rev. Peter Morales, in a statement about the tragic murders this weekend at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin

When I was fourteen, my Unitarian Universalist youth group and I traveled to the neighboring town of Oak Creek, Wisconsin to visit a Sikh temple. Yesterday, I was horrified to learn that six of these community members who welcomed a group of rowdy UU teenagers with open arms were murdered. Never could I have ever imagined that something so violent and hateful could happen a mere fifteen miles from my childhood home. The gunman has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others as a “frustrated neo-Nazi” and white supremacist.

e all know that there is a lot of very real hatred, inequity, and pain in this world. There are people dying from unjust laws, hatred brought on by lack of knowledge, and unfair actions based on anger or stereotypes. So when our pride flag was stolen it was easy to put it off as something that didn’t really matter.

Our church, like many UU churches, is a Welcoming Congregation and one of the ways that we publicly announce that is by hanging a Rainbow Flag outside our congregation. We are also far from the first church, even in Massachusetts, to have our flag stolen, vandalized, or destroyed. At least seven UU congregations have reported eleven separate instances of vandalism to their rainbow flags. We suspect the flag was torn down once in late August, and then it was stolen entirely in mid-September; today we rededicated and re-raised a new flag. After our main service we gathered back in the sanctuary to sing, to pray, to listen to members of the LGBTQ community and then to walk out to the front of our church and watch our flag be raised. We were joined by clergy from neighboring congregations and organizers from Massachusetts Equality.

This post was written by former SSL Campaign Manager Adam Gerhardstein in 2011, jsut before marriage equality became law in MN.

Yesterday I put on my yellow Standing on the Side of Love t-shirtfor the first time in a long while (Minnesota winters are not too conducive to t-shirts). I went to the Minnesota state capitol building and rallied against the proposed constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a purely heterosexual privilege. I have only been to a few rallies since I moved to Minnesota from Washington, D.C., but I have noticed that they are very different here.

Here are three things I’ve noticed.