Indiana: Freedom from or Freedom for?

I have this shirt. A friend of mine was moving to a shoebox apartment and needed to majorly downsize. Sorting through her boxes of clothes, I gratefully picked a few items including the purple (my favorite color) t-shirt with the phrase: “Gay? Fine by me.”

The shirt conveys tolerance; that’s a start. But the recent news out of Indiana, the state that  I called home during college, reminds me that tolerance doesn’t go far enough. I can tolerate people, but that doesn’t mean I need to do business with them.

A few weeks ago I finally watched The Butler (still wanting to see Selma). As I watched, I wept. The scene of the bus riots left me sick to my stomach, with supposedly “good Christian folk” spitting, yelling profanity and setting fire to those “freedom riders.” An article I found from 1961 notes,

The trouble at the Negro First Baptist Church erupted this evening when a crowd of white men, women and children began throwing stones through the windows as black civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King was speaking.

A church. The fire of those violent riots found their spark in a church. The bill in Indiana (and other states that have such laws) are somehow meant to protect freedom. But there are two kinds of freedoms: “freedom from” and “freedom for.”

We can want to be free from all kinds of things we don’t like. I could want to go live on an island where everyone ate local food, played Bach and read books. That’s not reality. I sense that those whose religious convictions encourage them to not associate with those who don’t share their views are motivated by “freedom from:” freedom from those who might not have the lifestyle, exact views or background that I do.

Many news stories, blogs, tweets and FB posts have voiced opposition to Indiana’s law such as this one by the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. These believers insist that to be a religious person, to believe in religious freedom, does not automatically put one in favor of a bill such as this one. I count myself among them. Though it is more challenging, I think we are called to live as “freedom for” people: freedom for love because God has shown love; freedom for mercy because God has shown mercy; freedom for acceptance because God has shown acceptance, especially to those the religious people were nervous about.

T-shirts don’t change hearts and minds; I don’t expect this post will either for those of my friends or family that disagree on these points. Yet I write it out of a conviction that I have been so richly blessed in my life by gay and lesbian friends and mentors; I want to know that in whatever state they’ll travel, they are met with grace and acceptance, the same kind that overflows from the God that accompanies us on every journey.