Stone-Catchers

One gaffe came to dominate analysis of the Republican win in the Virginia gubernatorial election. Terry McAuliffe, one heavily favored, misspoke badly on the issue of parental rights in education when he said that parents had no right when it came to curriculum. "No rights" is more idiotic than it is plain wrong. Of course, parents have rights. Of course, they have choices. But plain old common sense tells you that designing a curriculum is not every parent's right. It couldn't be. That is just as idiotic.

His failing campaign went limp after that, and the Republican candidate looked--and was--unstoppable. Glenn Youngkin rode McAuliffe's blip every time he spoke, and angry parents flocked to his side. McAuliffe got the heave-ho.

People chose Youngkin as their favorite for reasons only tangentially related to the words McAuliffe uttered. Angry parents came over to the businessman's side because what lay beneath McAuliffe's regrettable line was hot coals from what "CRT" has come to mean in the culture wars. The real horror to white parents--to white people--these days isn't being shut out of history department meetings but having their children, white children, feel white guilt, the fear that too much emphasis on this country's history of racial horrors will make them somehow regret their own racial identity, their being white.

Whether or not that's racism I'll let others decide. Even whether or not what they're afraid of is a legitimate fear is a good question. What isn't hard to see is that Republicans love culture wars. Boogey men arise all over because cultural wars issues are rooted in the heart, not in the head.

Me? I want to go to Montgomery, Alabama, to a place where America's racial history is commemorated in a museum whose story-telling its creators borrowed from the layout of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D. C. What's memorialized at The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is the sheer evil that grew from racial hatred in this country, our country. I'm not sure what CRT is, but let me clear here: any white parent who wouldn't allow his or her appropriate-age child to visit the Legacy Museum, that parent is racist.

The Legacy Museum features 800 steel memorials honoring African-American people who were lynched and 800 weathered steel columns suspended from the roof. The research team discovered more than 4400 such victims.

Bryan Stevenson is the Executive Director--and Founder really--of the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization that created and runs The Legacy Museum. Stevenson was the guest on Krista Tipett's On Being last Sunday, and as I listened in I couldn't help thinking that hundreds, thousands, of churches could well have simply given their pastors the day off and tuned in to On Being and let it play throughout the sanctuary. It was marvelous.

Stevenson, who has notched two decades and more as an advocate for unjustly treated inmates throughout the nation, explained his belief in the image of God in all men and women with one unforgettable line: "none of us is defined by our worst thing." 

The reckoning that has to happen in this country has to be rooted in a moral awareness, a moral awakening; a consciousness that evolves in a way that we begin to do the things that we must do if we’re going to not only save the country, but save ourselves. And this is where, for me, faith traditions become so important, because in the faith tradition I grew up in, you can’t come into the church and say, “Oh, I want salvation and redemption and all the good stuff, but I don’t want to admit to anything bad. I don’t want to have to talk about anything bad that I’ve done. 

And this: "We have to be stone-catchers," he said, a wonderful line taken from the gospel  story of the Samaritan woman, who is plainly guilty of what Jesus knows of her life. There's no question about her innocence; clearly she is receiving punishment for her prodigality. No one says, "she didn't do it." She did. 

But, famously, Christ says, "Let he of you who is without sin cast the first stone."

That story, Bryan Stevenson says, makes all of us "stone-catchers." That's our job.

That's justly and beautifully said. This morning's thanks is for Bryan Stevenson and his work in Montgomery, all of it. 

Got to get there myself.

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You can read a transcript of Bryan Stephenson's On Being interview here. Or, if you prefer, you can listen to the entire interview here.