Gary Zinik

  “Mom and Dad, there’s something I need to tell you, and you better sit down.” I was packing for a business trip and my thoughts were elsewhere when my 16 year-old son made this announcement. It was the “you better sit down” that caught my attention. I stopped what I was doing and sat on the sofa next to my wife. We waited. He was nervous and avoided eye contact. Finally he blurted out, “I’m gay.” I had an immediate sense of relief, and I think my wife did too. We were not surprised.

We had already had private discussions about the possibility that our son was gay. In fact, by the time he came out to us he already had a boyfriend (the man he would later marry). That night the three of us hugged and cried. My son was greatly relieved by our acceptance, admitting that he feared condemnation and rejection. Understandably so. LGBT kids often suffer inner turmoil over the decision to come out to their parents. When they have the courage to do so, many get judged harshly and at worst are expelled from home and lose the love and support they need the most. My daughter, on the other hand, dated boys in high school and had a couple significant relationships. However, after tagging along with her brother to gay parties and Pride festivals (maybe they were more fun), she “crossed over” and started dating girls. She has since married a woman.

By the time my kids were both in college, Proposition 8 (which banned gay marriage in California) was ruled unconstitutional, and the national campaign for Married Equality was in full swing. The Unitarian Universalist Church was on the forefront of that campaign, embodied by the slogan “SIDING WITH LOVE” emblazoned on their signature yellow T-shirts. Since my family personally had a lot at stake in that campaign (how many families have two gay kids?), I felt compelled to do something, and started a local chapter of PFLAG.

Founded in 1972, PFLAG is the first and largest organization in the county that provides support, education, and advocacy to parents, friends, and allies of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community. Beginning in 2012, Ventura PFLAG met monthly at UUCV. These were free, open support group meetings that were attended primarily by parents adjusting to the news they had an LGBTQ member of the family. We sat in a circle and took turns telling our stories. I learned to bring a box of tissues, since tears were common. But so was laughter, and it seemed miracle moments of deeper understanding happened regularly at the meetings. The world would be a better place if every family everywhere that’s adjusting to accepting a loved one as queer could attend a PFLAG meeting.

In 2017, PFLAG moved to the Community Resource Center, where it continues to meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month at 7:00pm, in person and on Zoom. Please email pflag.ventura.ca@gmail.com for more information. Also see www.diversitycollectivevc.org, and www.plfag.org. The mission of the UUCV Equity Ministry is to develop new understanding of power dynamics and learn new skills and new behaviors to build a more compassionate, aware, and equitable church community.

Neal Ortenberg
“Equality, Equity & Justice”

“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome… Justice can take equity one step further by fixing the systems in a way that leads to long-term, sustainable, equitable access for generations to come.”1

I was raised to know I am Jewish, and I have always felt that being a Jew is part of who I am. In my early teens I confronted my Jewishness in a way I did not expect. I was taking a walk and crossed the path of a group of Caucasian boys in their later teens aggressively bantering antisemitic barbs. Fear raced through me, but I knew I would be safe, because they could not know I was Jewish by my appearance. I looked white like them. I walked on silently without incident, wondering why those boys hated Jews, knowing that if I were a person of color, I could not have escaped safely from an anti-racial attack.

For the past 25 years I have studied the Dharma, the teaching of the Buddha, and I practice as best as I can in my daily life the Dharma teaching of showing loving kindness to all beings. Yet there are times when I have walked past a black man on the sidewalk and felt fear in my gut because the man is black, and then felt shame for having that feeling. What could I be afraid of?

Is it the tribal nature of the human species that makes the attainment of an equitable society so difficult? I read one article, Tribalism Is Human Nature 2, suggesting that “selective pressures have sculpted human minds to be tribal, and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups.” And I read another article, Humans are not Tribal 3, suggesting that “Humanity did not evolve with an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Solving society’s problems requires that we first diagnose them correctly.” 

Can we as a community take equity that one step further toward justice and find ways to fix our social systems in a way that leads to long-term, sustainable, equitable access for generations to come? What a huge task. I will continue to be as kind as I can to all human beings and when I experience anger or hurt or fear in reaction to the words or behavior of others, I will practice looking deeply into myself to find the source of those reactions.

1 Equity vs. Equality: What’s the Difference, Milton Public Health, George Washington University, 2020
2 Clark, Cory & Liu, Brittany & Winegard, Bo & Ditto, Peter. (2019). Tribalism Is Human Nature. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 10.1177/0963721419862289
3 Augustin Fuentes, John Templeton Foundation, The Well (2022), https://bigthink.com/the-well/tribalism-humans-not-tribal/

Kathleen Wheeler
“Helping Learning Happen”

As we continue the quest to build a culture of more awareness, compassion, and equity, I hope we will take to heart the story of the Ugly Duckling.  Developing awareness—of how we each have both suffered from, and contributed to, inequality—is only a beginning.  Awareness doesn’t translate to skill and grace immediately.  Let’s allow each other some inevitable “ugly duckling behavior” as we learn.
 
I have exhibited my share of ugly duckling behavior.  Usually, the resulting disapproval I get leads to feelings of guilt and me vowing to keep my mouth shut.  Once, however, a misguided outburst on my part was met with patience and kindness.  The result?  I was finally able to grasp a complex concept that had eluded me, and to replace resentment with compassion.
 
It happened during a week-long Climate Leader training.  As someone who is heartbroken by the human-caused devastation of the earth, I was impatient with the presenters’ emphasis on social justice. I decided to throw caution to the wind and express my feelings of anger and confusion.  “It feels like the climate is taking a back seat here!  Why does one man’s death, while horrific, cause a global outcry while the burning deaths of one billion animals in the wildfires of Australia cause hardly a ripple?!” 
 
The leader of my group listened carefully, then throughout that week gently helped me understand that if we don’t take the crises facing humanity as confounding and intersecting issues, we will leave people behind and we can’t win.    …That the climate movement’s biggest mistake would be calling itself an environmental movement. …That we can’t solve the climate crisis with the same exclusionist and extractive mindset that created it.  Racial justice is economic justice is gender justice is environmental justice—there’s just one fight and we need to break through our silos if we are to build a movement with a chance of making a difference. After that week, I finally “got” it:  Unless we understand the principle of intersectionality, we can’t begin to build a just and sustainable world, in harmony with nature. 
 
My entire worldview changed that week, not because of the facts presented during the training, but because of the accepting, patient, kind response I received from this woman as I was struggling to understand.  By making room for people being wherever they are on the learning curve, she helped me learn and to restore my hope. Let’s do that for each other as we continue to expand our minds and our hearts.

Kitty Merrill
“Attack of the Brain”

What do you do when you discover your brain is working to sabotage you? It’s not fun.  Actually, it’s mortifying.

To set the scene – I am sitting with a beloved trans friend, chatting, and I realize that in the back of my mind, I’m judging her without even realizing it. “She would be much prettier if she wore makeup, and got some different glasses,” I hear myself think. I am completely appalled. 

Where did I get a 1950s-style gender-repressive brain?

I’m heartbroken. Did I just actually assess her worth as a woman as lacking because of her appearance?   I love this young woman, and yet here is my brain is bringing out rules for what she needs to do to be a woman “the right way.” And by corollary, does that mean my brain thinks there are rules for everyone required to perform being a human correctly?

You have to understand how intense the awfulness of this feeling is. I’m a feminist, an ally to people of all modes of gender expression.  I don’t wear make-up. And I would never consciously think this thing that just came out of my brain, completely unbidden, completely unwanted and completely consciously rejected.

This is one of the reasons the church’s Equity Ministry is so important to me, and to all of us. I may have grown up rejecting these societal norms, whether of gender or race or any other structural “ism”, but it’s been part of the air I’ve breathed, invisible and unavoidable. Discovering that is both embarrassing and humbling. 

I want to do what I can to break that pattern, to find ways to let us all get in the habit of looking at our history, our current experiences, even the media we consume, and holding them up to the light to see what ideas may have snuck in.  Are there foundational falsehoods that have corrupted our sense of self-worth? Identity? What we deserve in life?

If we can do this, to train ourselves to look at some of our underlying, unquestioned assumptions, we can expose the hidden messages we have breathed in unawares.  Then our conscious minds can help us become the people we think we already are.  I hope the Equity Ministry can help us move in this direction.
 
Kitty – she/her