Photo of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church sanctuary by Flickr user notsofresh.

I just read via David Neiwert of Firedoglake that

In Tennessee this weekend, the chickens came home to roost when a gunman named James David Adkisson walked into a [Unitarian Universalist] Church and began shooting. So far, two people are dead, and seven more were wounded. He was saying “hateful things,” according to all the news reports.
Read the quote in context here.

Although it’s been many years since I was a member I grew up in that church. My youngest brother’s ashes are there. The last time I went, last year, my father introduced me around, so proud that I’d come back. I don’t know everyone who was injured but Greg McKendry, an usher, who died trying to push the gunman out of the way was a good friend of my father.

Teen calls foster father ‘hero’

Because he had family visiting from out of town and because things usually are pretty quiet in the summer my dad decided for the first time, he says, in years not to attend, nor were my mom, sister, or brother or any of their families.

The church has been a bit of a lightning rod in town ever since it’s foundation in the 1950s, from their sex education and comparative-religion Sunday school programs, their anti-war stances, their provision of sanctuary for refugees, their tolerance for the divorced, for feminists, for paganism and wikkans, for alienated or expelled members of a panoply of faiths, and more and more since the 1980s, for the LGBT community.

Unitarians in the south are kind of goofy, a little hokey (and often more than a little honkey), and often clumsy when it comes to all the nuances of progressive language. But in the regional sea of intolerance (in which local conservatives like Glenn Reynolds are sunk so deep they think their hands are dry) they’ve been a small, scrappy island of progressivism and a religious refuge for people those who aren’t welcome anywhere else.

My dad told me today that local right-wing and evangelical radio have lately been blasting the church over the “pro-homosexual agenda” embedded in “coded words” on the rainbow sign out front. The coded words? “We Welcome Everyone.” My dad said not everyone in the congregation had been enthusiastic, some were (rightly it turns out) fearful and some merely reluctant to “go that far,” and so the discussion to put up the sign was long.

[Update: After conversation with other family members it sounds like there had been an even more recent, contentious vote to put up a second sign saying that LGBT people were specifically welcome, which to some congregants would be seen as divisive for suggesting, at the least, that some of society’s “outcasts” are more welcome than others. It was evidently this recent, not-at-all-coded sign that had all the ‘wingers screaming, um, bloody murder. —fl]

In the end they voted for it as they have for so many controversial stands, and they stood for it, and now some have paid for their sweet, sometimes reluctant but always sincere faith and tolerance. I’m so sad and so proud of them.

My thoughts and tears go out to Greg and Linda who died, and for Joe and Jack, Betty, Linda, John, Tammy, and Allison, some of whom are still gravely wounded, and for their families, their friends, and for Jim Adkisson and his wife and family, and finally for Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity who’s books and broadcasts Adkisson immersed himself in but in whom he evidently found no solace.