June 7, 1712 The Pennsylvania Assembly banned the importation of slaves into the colony.
June 7, 1892 Homer Plessy, a Creole of European and African descent, was arrested and jailed for sitting in a Louisiana railroad car designated for white people only. Plessy had violated an 1890 state law, the Louisiana Separate Car Act, that called for racially segregated rail facilities. He then went to court, claiming the law violated the 13th and 14th amendments, but Judge John Howard Ferguson found him guilty anyhow. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed Plessy’s guilty verdict to stand by an 8-1 majority. The decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, established the doctrine of “separate but equal” [separate facilities for white and black people,] institutionalizing and legalizing segregation in the United States public transportation until 1946 in Morgan v. Virginia [see June 3, 1946]. More about Homer Plessy Read the decision
June 7, 1997 Seven activists are arrested for distributing copies of the Bill of Rights outside the Bradbury Science Museum, part of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the primary nuclear research facility in the U.S.
June 6, 1936 First issue of Peace News published in England. PeaceNews home page (Peace News subscriptions are no longer available. See this blog entry. -A. There is still useful information on its home page, etc.)
June 6, 1949 George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. It described a world in which totalitarian government controls the behavior of all, including the way one thinks.
This was summed up in the government’s slogans: War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength.
June 6, 1966 James H. Meredith, the first African American ever to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot by a sniper in the back and legs while on a lone “March Against Fear.” He was walking the 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage others to stand up for their rights and self-respect, and to register to vote. Law enforcement officers and reporters following him witnessed the attack, and the shooter was arrested. Read more
June 6, 1968 Comedian Dick Gregory began a hunger strike in the Olympia, Washington, jail after his arrest with others at a fish-in, an act of civil disobedience in support of the fishing rights of the Nisqually Indian Tribe. See what happened after his arrest
June 6, 1971 40 members of the American Indian Movement camped in the sacred Black Hills, or Paha Sapa, atop Mount Rushmore; 20 were arrested. They were demanding the U.S. honor the terms of the 1868 treaty with the Sioux Nation granting them the Black Hills territory. Read more
June 6, 1989 The FBI and the Department of Energy, tipped off by plant workers, raided the Rocky Flats nuclear production facility. They found numerous violations of federal anti-pollution laws including massive contamination of water and soil. Rockwell International, the operator of the facility, was fined $18.5 million.
“Queer” is not about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it), but “queer” as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” —bell hooks
I’ve always been queer, but it took me a while to realize it. Even after coming out as gay, I still struggled with the language of “queer” because I grew up hearing it used as a slur. In many places, it still is. I remember the shocked look on the faces of a lecture audience in rural England when I said “queer” — as if I had uttered a curse word.
This is how the word sits with many people — even within the LGBTQIA+ community. But over the years, as I’ve wrestled with my identity, learned the history of LGBTQIA+ liberation, and developed my beliefs, I’ve come to resonate deeply with being queer, just as much as with being Christian.
In fact, for me, to be an authentic Christian — one who seeks to follow the life and teachings of Jesus — is to be queer. Let me explain.
To be queer generally means one of two things. First, it’s a catch-all phrase for the LGBTQIA+ community — those who embrace a non-heterosexual orientation and/or non-cisgender identity. Second, queer also means to disrupt arbitrary norms, making space for diverse, often marginalized, expressions to flourish.
To be queer means resisting the repression of our true selves and the forces that demand we conform to others’ ideas of who we should be. It’s a declaration of our commitment to live authentically — who God created us to be — not who society or religion says we must become.
In this sense, queerness is holy. It affirms that God doesn’t make mistakes — that our unique expression reflects God’s creativity — and refuses to blaspheme the Creator by suppressing that divine image. When seen this way, queerness is a calling every person should aspire to.
To follow Jesus is to refuse conformity, as Paul wrote: “[to] be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). This means shifting how we see ourselves and others — removing the masks we were taught to wear, the roles we were conditioned to play. In this way, queerness is deeply aligned with the way of Jesus.
bell hooks defines queerness as “being at odds with everything around it.” That feels exactly right. We live in a world shaped by systems built to benefit particular people. What’s considered “normal” is often an invention — crafted to maintain control and marginalize difference. Nothing has always been the way it is, and it shouldn’t remain the same.
Today, there’s a rising awareness of the value of diversity and pluralism by many in society (while diversity is also demonized by many). More people are becoming suspicious of those who demonize difference and cling to the status quo. The past century has shown us that the status quo is often built on lies that lead to oppression.
Our society was set up by people who established norms to benefit themselves. But as the world grows more connected and aware of diverse ways of being, movements of resistance have chipped away at this conformity and demanded a new, inclusive path. These movements are “queering” society — questioning and resisting what’s been called normal — and they’ve made the world more just and diverse.
One of the most resistant institutions to queering has been Christianity. This isn’t surprising. Religion resists change, and Christian institutions have fought nearly every cultural shift from desegregation to women’s voting rights to rock music. Those willing to reform are often labeled heretics and excluded from church power. But every so often, resistance sparks reform in the church. The Protestant Reformation, the abolitionist movement, and the fight for women’s rights have all queered Christianity by disrupting norms and pushing forward new expressions of faith.
The inclusion of queer people in Christianity is another such movement. Today, nearly every mainline Protestant denomination in the U.S. officially affirms queer people. We can serve as clergy, marry, and be fully embraced. While there are many local congregations in each denomination that resist these changes, the movement for inclusion is well underway. This is a remarkable shift.
Just last year, Pope Francis announced that Catholic priests may bless same-sex couples. A few months before, he said transgender people could be baptized and serve as godparents. Though these don’t change Catholic doctrine, they marked major steps forward that made many lay queer Catholics feel more included in their churches.
Still, there is much work to do. The truth remains that most Christians worldwide still uphold anti-queer theology. Many still preach that homosexuality is an abomination. Many still teach that women must submit to men and cannot lead.
Progressive Christians sometimes believe the church is rapidly changing, but that’s often just the view from our bubble. Most Christians still cling to rigid, patriarchal theology. And I’ve come to believe that the only way to challenge that resistance is through queering.
Not every LGBTQIA+ Christian agrees with this strategy. There are many queer Christians who would prefer to simply shift the church’s understanding of the six clobber passages and be accepted into the traditional Christian institution with its traditional sexual ethics, understanding of relationships, and devotion to conservative theology otherwise. I understand that desire; I once had it too. But I’ve come to believe it’s actually counterproductive to our flourishing as queer people.
The more I’ve studied Scripture and listened to queer stories, the more convinced I’ve become: The issue isn’t a few misinterpreted Bible verses — it’s that Christianity was institutionalized. A few hundred years after Jesus, his radical movement was merged with the Roman Empire and transformed into rules, dogma, and rigid orthodoxy.
Other perspectives were labeled heresy, punished, and driven underground. What remained became dominant: a version of Christianity that, frankly, looks nothing like Jesus.
When I became a Christian, it was because I wanted to follow Jesus — not an institution. But I was quickly taught that faithfulness to Jesus meant faithfulness to the church. I learned the doctrines and ethics of my church and saw that the more I conformed, the more I was accepted — and even celebrated.
From adopting the politics of my pastors to unquestioningly espousing conservative theology, to even dressing in ways that mirrored the evangelical subculture, I learned that through conforming and contorting myself to look, believe, vote, and act like what was seen as normative for evangelical Christians, my inclusion would be solidified.
I gained status and privilege. I was affirmed by my church and I believed that this meant I was close to God. But I felt uneasy, even early on. As I read Scripture, I struggled to see our theology or ethics reflected in Jesus’ life. Jesus lived on the margins of religious and political power. He constantly challenged the status quo and resisted exclusionary doctrine.
I came to see that neither I nor my church looked like Jesus. That realization was unsettling. Eventually, it led me to believe that queering Christianity wasn’t just permissible — it was necessary. Not only for LGBTQIA+ inclusion, but for everything and everyone.
Rather than blindly accepting church authority, I began to pursue truth wherever it led and invited others to do the same. My ministry became about queering Christianity, not just including queer people in the traditional frameworks of the church.
That meant challenging every theology and ethic that doesn’t reflect Jesus’ ethic of love. It meant reimagining how we follow Jesus — beyond traditional Christianity.
This is, I believe, the most faithful path. But it’s also the hardest. It requires us to stop seeking the affirmation of and inclusion in the old structures and instead focus on building subversive, queerly spiritual communities that reflect the Spirit of Christ.
It means being open to truth from everywhere and everyone — because all truth is God’s truth — and letting it shape our spiritual journeys.
It means getting used to being called heretics. Excluded even from some so-called affirming churches that find our vision too radical. But our goal isn’t to be welcomed because we conform — it’s to create a community that welcomes all expressions and beliefs, grounded in the love and example of Jesus in whatever form that takes.
Our goal isn’t even to be “Christians,” really. Jesus never used that word. Never spoke a Christian doctrine. Never stepped inside a Christian church. So inclusion in the traditional institutions of Christianity isn’t the point.
The point is a truly queer revolution of faith that liberates us all to show up authentically, that remains open to the voice of our still-speaking God in the most unlikely people and places, and that understands that the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached and embodied can never be contained in the rigid boundaries of any institution, but is found among the diversity, complexity, and beauty of all of our human experiences.
Editor’s note: This essay is an adaptation from Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table. It has been adapted with the permission of St. Martin’s Essentials.
June 5, 1851 Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly began to appear in serial form in the Washington National Era, an abolitionist weekly. The novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a tear-jerking tale of the hardships of slavery, became a central reference point in the national debate over the issue. Read more
June 5, [since 1972] World Environment Day was established by the U.N. General Assembly to commemorate the opening of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in Sweden. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) was established as a result of the conference. The 1972 Stockholm conference UNEP’s mission: To provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations. Each year World Environment Day adopts a different theme.
June 5, 1989 Just a few days before the first fission reaction was to be allowed at New Hampshire’s Seabrook Station nuclear power plant, hundreds breached the security fence, leading to 627 arrests. They carried signs reading, “In Mourning for the Late, Great State of New Hampshire,” and “Remember Chernobyl.” Led by the Clamshell Alliance, their concern was for the safety of local residents in the event of a nuclear accident, as well as environmental pollution and the unsolved problem of safe disposal of nuclear waste generated by the reactor. There were also concerns for increased electricity rates to cover the costs of the project. Repeated significant protests occurred as early as 1976 at the beginning of construction when sometimes more than a thousand would be arrested. Ron Sher, a Seabrook spokesman, termed the demonstrators “very vocal but a small minority . . . They don’t represent the millions of people in New England that recognize that nuclear energy is a viable energy option.” The plant was projected to produce up to 1.15 gigawatts, enough for one million homes.
June 5, 1993 Thousands marched to protest neo-Nazi violence against foreigners, particularly ethnic Turks, living in Germany.
June 4, 1939 During what became known as the “Voyage of the Damned,” the SS St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Germany to the U.S., was turned away from the Florida coast. The ship, also denied permission to dock in Cuba, eventually returned to Europe; many of the refugees later died in Nazi concentration camps. The reality of what happened The movie based on the history
June 4, 1972 Angela Y. Davis, a former philosophy professor at the University of California, outspoken black leader and self-proclaimed communist, was acquitted on charges of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping by an all-white jury in San Jose, California. More on Angela Davis Angela Davis wearing a peace button from peacebuttons.info, speaking at The Grays Harbor Institute, Hoquiam, Washington April, 2007
June 4, 1987 New Zealand passed legislation declaring itself nuclear-free. In 1986, New Zealand had banned the entry of U.S. Navy ships from their ports in the belief that they were carrying nuclear weapons or were nuclear-powered. U.S. government protests of the policy led to breakup of the ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-United States) defense alliance.The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act of 1987 (which ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) prohibits the: • manufacture, acquisition, possession, control of any nuclear explosive device • aiding, abetting or procuring any person to manufacture, acquire, possess, or have control over any nuclear explosive device • transport, stockpiling, storage, installation, or deployment of any nuclear explosive device.
June 4, 1989 Hundreds of civilians were shot dead by China’s People’s Liberation Army during a bloody military operation in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Students and workers had become part of a growing pro-democracy movement, gathering there continuously for weeks. The Chinese government still officially denies any deaths occurred; thousands who were arrested “disappeared” and remain unaccounted for. “… deaths from the military assault on Tiananmen Square range from 180 to 500; thousands more have been injured . . . thousands of civilians stood their ground or swarmed around military vehicles. APCs [armored personnel carriers] were set on fire, and demonstrators besieged troops with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails.”* *From a comprehensive overview prepared by the National Security Archive based on formerly classified U.S. Government documents
I’m not advocating violence, of course, but I got a great giggle from this when I saw it. I thought others might, too. There is no direct violence, it’s more a karmic-type of happening.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Harald Ringbauer et al. writing in Nature report on a genetic study of the ancient Phoenicians that is really going to anger Lebanese Christian nationalists. In fact, it contains a profound lesson for nationalists and nationalism in general, which is that the whole thing is a scam thought up in the last 250 years.
The 19th century racist thinker Ernest Renan saw a racial distinction between “Aryans” and “Semites.” From that point of view, the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage had a racial element, since Phoenicians were classed as “Semites.” But it turns out it was all a tiff among people we would now class as Italians.
The Phoenicians had been thought to be a unified civilization that began in what is today Lebanon. Well, they did start off in what is today Lebanon. But the “unified civilization” bit turns out to be a misconception.
The Phoenicians developed an alphabet. Like most alphabets, the letters had originally been pictograms. The Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, as well as the Greek and Roman alphabets (we still use the latter) derived from the Phoenician. For instance a picture of waves stood for water (ma’), and that became our M, which still looks like waves. Or a circle stood for eye (`ayn), which became our ‘o.’
Since the Phoenicians founded city-states all around the Mediterranean and left inscriptions in that alphabet, scholars had assumed that they were a related people. Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean were called “Punic,” but the language and customs were the same.
Regarding the Lebanese origins of this civlizational complex, Ringbauer et al. write, “We find that individuals from the Levantine Phoenician site of Akhziv in present-day Israel cluster together with previously published Bronze and Iron Age Levantine individuals, including from Megiddo in present-day Israel and the Phoenician cities of Sidon and Beirut in present-day Lebanon.” That is, they looked at ancient individuals from around the Levant and found that they all had shared haplotypes, i.e. they were Canaanites. Phoenicians, Hebrews, Nabataeans, etc. were all Canaanites culturally and genetically.
Now imagine the scientists’ astonishment when they looked at DNA from individuals who had lived in Phoenician cities such as Ibiza off Spain or Carthage in Tunisia to find that it did not display the ancient haplotypes or genetic sequences associated with Levantine peoples.
They write, “However, a mitochondrial genome from Carthage and whole-genome data from 12 individuals from the nearby rural Punic site of Kerkouane show substantial south European ancestry as well as indigenous North African ancestry. Partial North African ancestry was also found in genome-wide data from eight individuals from two Punic sites in Sardinia, combined with a broad eastern Mediterranean ancestry. Together with analysis of the whole-genome sequence of an individual from Ibiza, which was also interpreted to harbour eastern Mediterranean ancestry, this suggested that Punic people had complex ancestry.”
They observe of these “Phoenicians of the middle and western Mediterranean, “They are broadly distributed with a primary mode overlapping Bronze and Iron Age individuals from Sicily and the Aegean, regardless of sampled location.” There were only three exceptions: two persons from Sicily and one from Sardinia showed Canaanite genetic heritage.
In all the other 119 samples from “Punic” sites, the genetic heritage was mixed, showing patterns similar to those in ancient Greece and Sicily. After around 550 BC, when Carthage was founded by the “Phoenicians” in what is now Tunisia, some North African [Amazigh] genetic heritage starts to circulate among some of them. But this was a minority population. The authors observe, “Even in North Africa, 10 out of the 27 individuals from Kerkouane and 5 out of the 17 individuals from Carthage can be modelled with no indigenous North African ancestry, and 84% of individuals from these sites have more than 50% Sicilian–Aegean ancestry, making it the dominant ancestry component also in North African Punic sites.”
Also, the Iberians were mostly not Iberians. “Only two Iberian individuals, from Ibiza and Cádiz, had confidently high proportions of Bronze Age Iberian ancestry… Instead, Punic sites in the western Mediterranean share similar ancestry distributions of predominantly Sicilian–Aegean or North African origin.”
So how did all this happen? The authors hypothesize that Lebanese Phoenicians colonized Sicily, which had earlier had Greek colonies, and the Sicilians adopted Phoenician language, religion and culture. They they were the ones who struck out west, establishing Phoenician colonies in the central and western Mediterranean.
Ringbauer and his colleagues explain, “A critical question raised by our results is how and when Canaanite–Phoenician culture and language were adopted by people without any detectable Levantine ancestry. One hypothesis is that, after Levantine Phoenicians founded settlements in the central and western Mediterranean in the early first millennium bce, these communities continuously incorporated people with Sicilian–Aegean ancestry.”
Glass head pendant, Phoenician or Carthaginian, ca. 450–300 BCE. Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain.
Reporting on the study for a Nature briefing, Ewen Callaway quotes Ringbauer as asking how it was that many Mediterranean peoples abandoned their own local cultures for that of the Phoenicians. “Does this mean Phoenician culture was like a franchise that others could adopt? That’s one for the archaeologists.”
Of course they were a franchise. So were the ancient Greeks, whose culture was adopted by so many Egyptians in places like Alexandria. As late as the 200s and 300s, there are no Arabic or Aramaic inscriptions in and around Damascus, only Greek ones. Ashkenazi Jews in Europe were also a franchise, which was joined by many gentiles — especially but not only women.
Nineteenth century European theorists of nationalism confused language groups with kinship groups, assuming that people who spoke a language were a “race,” perhaps even a “pure” one.
Today many Lebanese Christians claim to be “Phoenicians,” as though it was a pure “race” unconnected to the “Arabs.” And they take pride in Carthage, a Phoenician city, and in the Phoenician outposts of Spain, imagining they were all “Lebanese.” Ringbauer has knocked that down.
There are no nations or races of that sort. There are no “Aryans” and “Semites.” This was a linguistic distinction that was stupidly racialized. Racial “nation” was all a fevered racist fantasy. Even modern genetics only traces two lines of ancestry, the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA of the X chromosome, whereas we have millions of ancestors. We’re all mongrels, all mixed up, and people in the Mediterranean basin all have a common ancestor from not so long ago. All humans have one likely only 200,000 years ago.
June 3, 1900 The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), a consolidation of seven smaller east coast needle trades unions, was founded. Read more Herman Grossman, ILGWU president
June 3, 1946 In Irene Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional as “an undue burden on commerce.” The southern states refused to enforce it, however, and Jim Crow (the term for laws, local and state, that enforced segregation) continued as the way of life in the South. Eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia. Read more about Irene Morgan Recovering from surgery and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white couple. Like Parks, Morgan was arrested and jailed. But her action caught the attention of lawyers from the NAACP, led by (future Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and two years later her case reached the Court. Headlines when Irene Morgan won out over Jim Crow (JC) segregation law
June 3, 1957 Thousands of scientists, led by Barry Commoner and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, issued a call for banning nuclear weapons testing: “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make those dangers known.” “…Then on May 15, 1957, with the help of some of the scientists in Washington University, St. Louis, I wrote the Scientists’ Bomb Test Appeal, which within two weeks was signed by over two thousand American scientists and within a few months by 11,021 scientists, of forty-nine countries….” –Linus Pauling Linus Pauling at a disarmament demonstration photo: Robert Carl Cohen
June 3, 1964 Conscientious objection, the refusal to bear arms in time of war on the grounds of moral or religious principles, became legally recognized in Belgium. A history of European conscientious objection
“This is your month to celebrate the strength and courage it takes to be your authentic self. But this month is not just about celebrating, it’s also about commemorating and remembering AND creating safer spaces for people to feel Pride about being their authentic selves!
“These quotes from activists, artists, politicians, entertainers, and more emphasize what it means to be an LGBTQ+ person. I hope they inspire and encourage you along your journey of being LGBTQ+ or celebrating those who are.
1. “Love is too beautiful to be hidden in the closet.” – Anonymous
2. “It takes no compromise to give people their rights … it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” – Harvey Milk
3. “So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.” – Tim Cook
Scottie's Playtime 