June is Pride Month, and LGBTQ+ communities across the South and elsewhere are celebrating, while some state legislatures across the country have passed or are considering new anti-LGBTQ laws. In the middle of this controversy, Salvation South editor Chuck Reece has decided to stick with a simple lesson his father taught him years ago in this week's episode.

Love symbol with hands in front of a pride flag
Credit: Adobe Stock Image

TRANSCRIPT:

If you’re a Southerner, the mere mention of the word “home” can bring you to tears. Home is the place where there are biscuits and fried chicken. Home is the place where you became who you are. And home is the place where you are always — no matter what you have done — welcomed.

Well, that’s what home means if you are one of the lucky folks, like me, who got to grow up in a home like that.

Home means something very different for many people, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because June is Pride Month, a month of celebration for folks in the LGBTQ community.

If you are somebody who thinks of home as precious and holy, in the way I just described, I’d ask you to pause and consider a couple of facts. The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides services for LGBTQ young people, did a study in 2021. It showed that 28% of LGBTQ youth have been homeless or experienced unstable housing and 14% of queer young people reported that their parents had kicked them out or abandoned them because they were gay or bisexual or transgender.

Now, I could take time here to go deeper into this. I could wonder out loud about the almost 500 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures across the whole country over the past couple of years. But it might be more effective to talk about a lesson I learned at home, when I was a kid.

The wedding band I wear belonged to my father. It went through World War II on his finger. And I’ll never forget the story Dad told me about the day his unit joined the forces that liberated Buchenwald, one of the Nazi concentration camps. He remembered breaking through a locked door of a wooden building and finding the ground floor filled with starving prisoners. And he remembered what they discovered upstairs: cases upon cases of canned food, just out of reach of people who obviously had not eaten in weeks.

My dad said that day taught him a lesson that stayed with him forever — specifically that people who might be completely different from you deserve the same basic human kindnesses that you do. Dad never knew Jewish people when he was growing up in the North Georgia mountains, but when he saw what he saw, he knew forever that they were God’s children, just like him. And he passed that belief — that in God’s eyes, we are all equal — on to me.

This Pride Month, I feel quite comfortable — in my own very Southern skin — to just stick by that lesson my daddy taught me.

Come see us at SalvationSouth.com.

Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Fridays at 7:45 a.m. during Morning Edition and 4:44 p.m. during All Things Considered on GPB Radio. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South and please download and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform as well.