My faith is clear: One cannot worship Jesus Christ and forget that Jesus and his family were refugees and immigrants.
By now it’s difficult not to know something about the abhorrent, racist, xenophobic and patently false statements made by Ohio Sen. JD Vance and amplified by numerous other politicians including former president Trump regarding the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Oh.
Due to family circumstances, I found myself visiting Springfield nearly every day for the last two weeks and experiencing with that community a piece of the anxiety caused by the lies and the threats of violence that have targeted their local city government, K-12 education, colleges and health care facilities.
Processing my own reactions and thoughts on this and other completely avoidable moments of division and discord, I recognized three lessons that the LGBTQ+ community can learn from the mess in Springfield.
First, the people calling for mass deportations of immigrants while exhorting supposedly Christian messages are the same people who attempt to utilize the Bible to call for unity and love while passing laws that further marginalize LGBTQ+ people. The Bible consistently recognizes the importance of protecting immigrants, without regard to their legal status.
Second, our fight for justice is truly intersectional in more ways than we predict. While race, ethnicity, national origin and status as immigrants were the salient identities named by both politicians and the media, we know that there are LGBTQ+ people in the Haitian American community. We also know — anecdotally at least — that the spike in hate targeting the immigrant community contributed to increased vitriol targeting LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender young adults, in Springfield.
Third, and without a doubt the most important, as a community that knows the fear of our freedom and very existence depending on who wins which election and what they do when in office, we cannot afford to only show up when our rights are threatened. We must show up when the rights of our BIPOC, immigrant, disabled and other siblings are threatened.
As memes have paraphrased to great effect, “First they came for <insert marginalized identity>, and I stood up because I know how the rest of the poem goes.”
One would need to be immensely foolish to call the situation in Springfield “good,” but good can come from it. Unless I have underestimated Sen. Vance, I doubt he knew that his heinous statements would encourage the level of support for the immigrant community in Springfield, or how the media and others would begin to tell the story of this large group of people who, fleeing desperate situations, would come to western Ohio and help revive a struggling community.
May our community show up for any community under attack and may others show up for us too.
This commentary was originally published by the Buckeye Flame and republished here with permission.
