The Wild Reed

Saturday, July 04, 2026

On July 4th, Two Very Different Marches

This morning my friends Kathleen and Rita and I participated in a somber ritual of remembrance and call to action for all who have died in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention.

Following is how the online community Humanizing Through Story described our gathering, one that was organized by the Minnesota chapter of the Sunrise Movement.

Today, July 4th, a funeral was held for the 52 people who died in ICE detention during the Trump administration. Hundreds of people rallied and carried caskets, one for each of the 52 victims. They crossed the Hennepin Avenue Bridge, marching in silence to the sound of songs led by The Singing Resistance. They marched to downtown Minneapolis, where they laid the caskets on the ground outside the U.S. Department of Justice building. There, they held a funeral service featuring eulogies, speeches, and songs honoring all the lives taken by ICE.

The 52 deaths represent only recorded accounts. This administration is actively trying to hide accusations of abuse and harm, and it recently issued a directive to stop recording deaths of immigrants who were recently released from custody. There have been multiple accounts of immigrants, including the elderly and those with mental health issues, being released by ICE in unfamiliar cities or during frigid winter temperatures, where they subsequently died. This number also does not account for other deaths’s involving ICE, such as those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

There are endless reports of abuse, sexual assault, rape, torture, the withholding of food, contaminated water, the denial of medical care, and other inhumane conditions and treatment toward immigrants held in detention centers across the country. This protest was held not only to honor those who have died but also to raise awareness and call for an end to the inhumane treatment and detention of our neighbors.

– Humanizing Our Stories
via social media
July 4, 2026

– Image: Photographer unknown.

– Image: Humanizing Through Story.

Meanwhile, Melinda Fulton reports on a very different march that took place today in the nation’s capital.

I’m watching masked white nationalists march through Washington, D.C., on the Fourth of July carrying Confederate flags and “Reclaim America” banners, and I’m supposed to believe this has nothing to do with the man in the White House. I’m supposed to pretend this is just some fringe spectacle, disconnected from the political climate we’ve been living through for years.

But this is exactly what a Trump presidency looks like when you stop listening to the speeches and start paying attention to who feels empowered enough to march openly through the nation’s capital.

These aren’t random provocateurs looking for attention. They are members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist, neo fascist organization that openly promotes the idea of turning America into a white ethnostate. They chose to parade through Washington on the 250th anniversary of the United States because they believed that was the moment to make themselves seen.

Every time someone tells me that “MAGA is just about loving America,” I think about scenes like this. I think about the Confederate flags. The matching uniforms. The masks hiding their faces. The chants about “reclaiming” a country that never belonged exclusively to one race in the first place.

I think about years of rhetoric describing immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation, warning about “invaders,” talking about “enemies within,” and constantly dividing Americans into “real Americans” and everyone else. Then I watch groups like Patriot Front step confidently into the streets, and I’m expected to believe there’s no connection.

MAGA Republicans are the reason I want change in this country. They want me to believe this is normal now. They want me to accept that open white nationalism is just another political viewpoint, that marching through the capital in masks with fascist slogans deserves the same respect as people peacefully demanding equal rights. I refuse. If this is what Trump’s America looks like in the streets, then I’m going to keep saying exactly what I see. Those are his people. This is his movement. And if you’re still defending him, you don’t get to act shocked when people inspired by that movement show up dressed for a racist parade on America’s birthday.

– Melinda Fulton
via social media
July 4, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Minnesotans on the American Experiment, 250 Tears On – Matthew Alvarez, et al (MPR News, July 4, 2026).
Hate Group Turns D.C. Into “Fascist Hellscape” With July 4 March – Andrew Hazzard (Common Dreams, July 4, 2026).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The “Power, Peril and Importance” of What’s Happening in Minnesota
• Only the Beginning
• The North Remembers
• “It’s All Lies and Propaganda”
• What This Moment Feels Like in Minnesota
• Quote of the Day – February 23, 2026
• Greg Ketter: A Valiant Minnesotan
• Dispatches from Occupied Minnesota
• More Dispatches from Occupied Minnesota
• Honoring Renée Good and the “Astonishing Surge of Courage” of Minneapolis
• Renée Good and Alex Pretty: “They Were Alive. Then They Were Not”
• Bruce Springsteen and the Streets of Minneapolis in the Winter of ’26

Opening image: Humanizing Through Story.
All other images: Michael J. Bayly (unless where otherwise noted).

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

June Vignettes

Queer Perspectives on an Anti-Queer Op-Ed

On the last day of Pride month, Matthew Vines, author of God and the Gay Christian, wrote an op-ed published in the New York Times that frames queer identities as a nemesis to what he still calls a “gay rights movement.”

Following are a number of responses which I find both insightful and inspiring. Perhaps you will too.

___________

I have so many things I could say in response to Vines article, but I’m not sure I even want to dignify his points with a response. For as much education as he has under his belt, this is utter nonsense. It’s a privileged, limiting, superficial, desperate attempt at protecting one identity by limiting the identity of others.

So let me make one thing very clear: BEING QUEER IS A GIFT, my dear friends.

AND IT MATTERS.

In all its arrays of beautiful barrier-breaking diversity, it is the biggest gift to the world and the deepest reflection of the Divine.

Who you are matters.

Your gay self.

Your bi self.

Your trans self.

Your non-binary self.

Your gender non-conforming self.

Your questioning self.

Your closeted and not safe to come out yet self.

Your intersex self.

Your pansexual self.

Your polyamorous self.

Your asexual self.

Your QUEER self.

ALL of who you are and what makes you unique is worth protecting and fighting for.

Don't let a weak, watered down, fearful approach to the world put yet one more baracade in front of you living your most whole, alive, completely embodied life. Live YOU. Be YOU. Love YOU.

Vines does not speak for me.

I'm gay AND queer. It matters. 🏳️‍🌈❤️🏳️‍⚧️

– Amber Cantorna-Wylde
via social media
June 30, 2026

Our subversion of social norms is our power, friends. We exist in God’s creation specifically to be a thorn in the side of those who demand conformity.

The privilege and, frankly, gall it takes to look at the history of our movement – a movement populated with and propelled by freaks and outcasts who countered culture with all of the weirdness they could wear on their beautiful bodies – that privilege is the thing that has no place in this movement.

Anyone who says this:

“In a time of backlash, this is not a confusion that gay people can afford, especially those of us who live in red states and religious communities.”

. . . has lost touch with the heart of what we’re doing here.

We’re now bowing to culture. We’re not playing respectability politics, and we’re sure as hell not leaving any of our rainbow fam behind to score a few points with the bigots in power.

– Flamy Grant
via social media
June 30, 2026

I worked in proximity with Matthew when I was at the National LGBTQ Task Force. Matthew leads the Reformation Project which is rooted in Calvinism. It seeks to stay within what I would call rigid, Reform Protestantism/mostly white Evangelical circles and just add LGBTQ (although mostly lesbian and gay) folks into a largely unchanged worldview.

While I appreciate his desire to work within really conservative circles, I do not agree with his premise.

Given the rise of White Christian nationalism – in many of the spaces in which he is seeking to operate – to advocate that the problem is the LGBTQ+/Queer movement's languaging and desire to transform dominant culture and narratives and not the danger posed by the "modern re-articulation of the Doctrine of Discovery" as Project 2025/Seven Mountain Mandate/New Apostolic Reformation are rightly called, is particularly dangerous right now. The violent misogyny, homo-, bi-, transphobia, the virulent xenophobia and racism of this movement threaten us all. And its long, long history here in the US is something that needs to be dismantled/repudiated.

Starting with the first piece of existing European art from the Americas (an etching portraying the mass execution of genderqueer or homosexual Cuna people by Balboa), gender and sexual variety have been used by the Doctrine of Discovery (and white, Christian supremacy) to distinguish between those who are human (Christian and Europeanm . . . which has evolved into Whiteness and Christian) and those who are heathen or savage.

As an LGBTQ+/queer movement, this grounding in the history of the Doctrine of Discovery and a more intersectional lens, makes me reject his argument. Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery and dismantling White Christian nationalism have to be the goal. Not appeasing or gaining entry into a diseased and distorted version of Christianity.

One more thing, Matthew is white, young, conservative Christian, able-bodied and cisgender. I don't hear a lot of BIPOC, non-binary, non-Christian, femme or woman-identified, disabled, etc queer folks making the same argument.

– Rev. Rebecca Voelkel
via social media
July 1, 2026

The argument that “queer” identity is harming gay people rests on a fragile foundation which assumes that the backlash we’re seeing is mostly the result of LGBTQ people becoming too broad, too visible, too complicated, too trans, too nonbinary, too politically unruly, and too unwilling to fit into a neat public-relations package. But that is not what I see.

I see a well-funded, well-organized backlash against all of us. I see politicians and preachers using trans people as a wedge because they know fear works. I see the same old machinery of dehumanization that was used against gay and lesbian people being repurposed against trans and nonbinary people. I see efforts to roll back LGBTQ protections, demonize gender-diverse children, restrict medical care, narrow public education, and revive old claims that our lives are threats to children, family, faith, and civilization itself. That didn’t happen because some young people began identifying as queer, but because the religious and political right never repented of its need for a scapegoat.

Gallup’s 2026 polling does show that support for same-sex marriage has fallen from its recent peak: 65% of Americans now support legal same-sex marriage, down from 71% in 2022 and 2023. The share saying gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable is at 62%, its lowest point since 2016. But Gallup also notes that most of the recent decline has occurred among Republicans, whose support for same-sex marriage fell from 55% in 2021 and 2022 to 37% in 2026.

In other words, the data doesn’t show that queer identity caused the backlash, but rather that we’re living through a partisan and religiously fueled backlash against LGBTQ people. Blaming queer identity for this anti-LGBTQ backlash feels like blaming the wounded for bleeding too loudly.

. . . I am, in many ways, exactly the kind of gay man respectability politics should love. I am a white, cisgender, out gay man. I am legally married to one man. I believe in covenant, fidelity, Scripture, tradition, reason, experience, and the sacramental life of the church. I believe marriage is one of the means of grace through which God answers the ache of Genesis: “It is not good that the human being should be alone.” I am a Christian pastor. I preach, preside at Holy Communion, baptize babies, visit the sick, bury the dead, officiate at weddings, and pray the prayers of the church. I have given my life to the ministry of Word, Sacrament, Order, and Service. In other words, I am hardly the caricature of radical disorder that some people imagine when they hear the word “queer.”

And yet, I am queer.

I’m queer not because I’ve rejected Christianity, marriage, sanctification, Scripture, or the church. I’m queer because I exist at the intersection of identities that many conservative Christians assert cannot belong together: gay and Christian, gay and married, gay and ordained, gay and faithful, gay and loved by God without first being made straight. That’s queer.

It’s queer because the systems that form so many of us have long insisted that those things were contradictions. They have screamed at us that we could be gay or Christian, but not both. Honest about ourselves or ordained, but not both. Married to our same-sex partners or faithful to God, but not both. True to ourselves or beloved by God, but not both. My life says otherwise, and that is why I have begun using the term “queer” for myself.

For a long time, I primarily used the word gay to describe myself. I still do. It’s true, accurate, and names my sexual orientation. But “gay” doesn’t always carry the full weight of what it has meant to survive the church’s attempt to divide me against myself.

That’s also part of why my forthcoming book is titled Suspended Grace: A Queer Pastor’s Journey. It will be available in November from Abingdon Press, and in it I explore much more fully what it means to live at the intersection of identities that the church has often claimed couldn’t belong together: gay, Christian, married, ordained, wounded, called, and beloved.

To be clear, I’m not using “queer” as a synonym for a political platform, a rejection of covenant, or a dismissal of Christian sexual ethics. For me, “queer” names something more than orientation. It names the disruption that happens when a life the church once called impossible becomes, by grace, fully visible. It names the reality that my life doesn’t fit inside the categories handed down to me. It names the grace that met me outside the boundaries of what I’d been told was possible. And it names the holy refusal to let shame have the final word. God didn’t rescue me by making me acceptable to the old system; God rescued me by showing me that the old system had lied.

For me, that’s not a rejection of Christian faith but a testimony to it. The Gospel is not nearly as invested in “normal” as some Christians seem to be. The incarnation isn’t normal. The resurrection isn’t normal. Grace isn’t normal. A crucified Messiah isn’t normal. A Table where the poor, wounded, sinful, excluded, respectable, and despised are all invited to receive mercy isn’t normal. The Kingdom of God isn’t a baptized version of middle-class respectability; it’s a new creation in Christ Jesus.

. . . I’m gay. I’m queer. I’m Christian, an ordained pastor, white, male, cisgender, married, and by many outward measures very conventional. And still, I’m queer. I’m queer because my life is only possible by the grace of a God who keeps crossing the boundaries fearful humans keep drawing. I’m queer because my marriage is a testimony against the lie that gay love can’t be holy. I’m queer because my ministry is a testimony against the lie that gay people can’t proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’m queer because my survival is a testimony against the lie that shame is the voice of God. I’m queer because I refuse to purchase my place in the church or the world by stepping over the bodies of those whom respectability would leave behind.

– Rev. Gregory S. Neal
via social media
July 1, 2026

As someone who aspires to be a responsible ally, I respect every human being's personal perspective on these words and how they impact their own experience, Matthew Vines’ included.

I completely yield to his position regarding his own life and the way he wishes to exist in the world. I would never question that for him or anyone. We are all the authorities over our own humanity. I would never ask him to embrace queerness as a label any more than I would ask him to embrace heterosexuality.

Yet, I do feel that his words about the queer community seem to be born out of the misplaced feeling that he can somehow evade the Right's disdain and their punitive violence by distancing himself from supposedly "less palatable" expressions of sexuality, but that seems myopic to me. As a white gay man, Vines may feel he is distinct from a black trans woman (and of course he is), but to the hateful Evangelicals steering us into theocracy, there is no difference whatsoever.

To these phobic zealots, trans people are nonbinary people, are gay people, are nonconforming people, are lesbian people, are bisexual people.

It seems as though Matthew is choosing to lean away from the collective liberation of all marginalized people in the hopes of finding safety in the sexual and political expression of least resistance.

– John Pavlovitz
Excerpted from From A Straight Ally:
Why Matthew Vines' Dismissive Words
About the Queer Community Matter
The Beautiful Mess
July 1, 2026

The real argument around Matthew Vines' article has little to do with what word people use – the headline is misleading. It has more to do with what tactics are used in the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ equality and who gets included in that fight. Vines argues not that the word queer is absolutely unhelpful or inappropriate, but that the theory behind it is. He is opposed to how fluid the queer movement has become, including people who have diverse sexualities or gender identities beyond the binary "gay" and "lesbian", which he sees as fueling GOP opposition to the LGBTQ+ movement. He sees the queer project of opposing arbitrary norms as inherently unhelpful and dangerous. I disagree.

The science and psychology of sexuality and gender have evolved greatly. While it is true that there are many who experience "fixed" sexualities and genders (gay, lesbian, straight, cisgender male, cisgender female), we also know that there are many more who experience sexuality and gender on a spectrum.

I also disagree that simply fitting into the mold of being a respectable gay person is the path that led to LGBTQ+ rights and will help us achieve more robust LGBTQ+ rights in the future. Many, and I'd venture to say most, LGBTQ+ people will never simply live the "normal life" – part of what makes our community so beautiful is that we get to show others the wide array of possibilities that exist for our lives beyond what has been considered "normal." If we are relying on convincing conservative America that "LGBTQ+ people are just the same as you", then we will never win, because it is glaringly obvious that many LGBTQ+ people are *not* just like them in many ways. In our fundamental humanity, yes. In our desire for love and relationships, yes. But we are also unique in many other ways in the way we desire to live our lives.

Instead, I, and many others, in the long tradition of queer activism, believe that the way we win is through living our "abnormal" lives out loud, for all to see, so that we can dispel the demonizing myths that the far right spins against us, and so that we can expand the possibilities for what life can look like for the broader population- more creative, more diverse, more free than ever before.

This is not a debate about what label people use. This is a debate about who is included in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality and how we continue to advance it. Assimilation has never been the path towards victory and has never been the goal – liberation has. That is where I disagree with Vines.

. . . Queerness, ultimately, is an invitation to and affirmation of human freedom. It’s an affirmation of the possibilities of human imagination. It’s a confrontation of our biases, our prejudices, and our desire to appease some arbitrary idea of “normal” in order to gain status and privilege.

– Brandon Robertson
via social media
July 1, 2026

Monday, June 29, 2026

Being One With the Beloved, the Source of All Things

This evening I share my adaptation of Lesson 164, “Now are we one with Him Who is our Source,” from A Course in Miracles – Volume II: Workbook for Students.

I experience in the words of this lesson both a guiding light and a healing balm to all that threatens to obscure the holy peace already (and always) deep within me – deep within all of us. It is the peace of the Beloved One, which is my preferred term for God, the Divine Presence at the heart of all things.

As with the previous adaptations of A Course in Miracles that I’ve shared (see here, here, here and here), if the one below resonates with you, feel free to make it even more meaningful by using your preferred images and words – “God,” “Allah,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Holy One,” “Great Spirit,” “Father,” “Mother.” . . . I trust they all serve as different pathways leading up the same holy mountain; or, to use another metaphor, different gateways leading inwards to our center, the deepest part of which we all share. For as Henri Nouwen so beautifully reminds us: “In the depths of my being, I meet my fellow humans with whom I share [all things].”

__________________

The present is the only time there is. And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever there – not in our sight, but in the vision of the Beloved One, the Source of all things. . . . The senseless busy world fades easily away before this vision. Its sounds grow dim. A melody from far beyond the world increasingly is more and more distinct – an ancient call to which the Source within and beyond gives an ancient answer. You will recognize them both. For they are but your answer to the Beloved’s call to you.

. . . There is a silence into which the world cannot intrude. There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. There is a sense of holiness in you the thought of sin has never touched. All this today you will remember. . . . This is the day when vain imaginings part like a curtain to reveal what lies beyond them. Now is what is really there made visible, while all the shadows which appeared to hide it sink to obscurity. . . . Now will you see it with the eyes of the Beloved. Now is its transformation clear to you.

This day is sacred to the world. Your vision, given you from far beyond all things within the world, looks back on them in a new light. And what you see becomes the healing and salvation of the world. The valuable and valueless are both perceived and recognized for what they are. And what is worthy of your love receives your love, while nothing to be feared remains.

. . . We bless the world as we behold it in the light in which the Beloved One looks on us and offer it the freedom given us through the Beloved’s forgiving vision, now our own. Open the curtain by merely letting go all things you think you want. Your trifling treasures put away and leave a clean and open space within your mind where the Beloved can come and offer you the treasure of transformation. The Beloved One has need of your most holy mind to transform the world.

Is not this purpose worthy to be yours? Is not the Beloved’s vision worthy to be sought above the world’s unsatisfying goals? Let not today slip by without the gifts it holds for you receiving your consent and your acceptance. We can change the world if you acknowledge them.

– From Lesson 164
of A Course in Miracles:
Workbook for Students

Sunday, June 28, 2026

With the Green Party at Twin Cities Pride

I spent most of today with friends from the Green Party of Minnesota. We came together to staff a booth at the annual Twin Cities Pride Festival in Loring Park, just southwest of downtown Minneapolis.

As well as providing information about the Green Party, we also let people know that there are four Green Party candidates on the ballot in November – Steve Young and Jane Kirby, Green Party candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor; Seth Kuhl-Stennes, Green Party candidate for Secretary of State; and Ngone Niang, Green Party candidate for State Senate District 39.

In the image above, I’m pictured with fellow Green Party volunteers Adam and Rachel and Green Party candidate for Governor Steve Young (at left).