David Bowie famously wrote, “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, Turn and face the strange, Ch-ch-changes.” The older I get the more I realize that life is about changes. I ponder what it was like for my father’s generation. Dad was born in 1909. He once told me that he could remember the first time he heard a radio in rural Minnesota. Some call his generation the Greatest Generation. They lived through changes brought by the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, a man on the Moon, and more.
My family was the first family on our block to own a color TV in the 1960s. It is not because we could afford one. It is because my mother bought a one-dollar church raffle ticket and won a monster twenty-five-inch RCA stereo console with AM/FM and record changer. Color TV brought change to our neighborhood. I remember neighbors visiting our house one Sunday evening just to watch the NBC peacock introducing Walt Disney. I suspect that many kids in our neighborhood lobbied parents to get a color TV after that. Small “Ch-ch-changes.”
There are many people who don’t like change. Many want things to be the way they used to be in “the good old days”. Some see the past as if it were an episode of Happy Days or maybe the movie Grease. But life has never been like an amusing romp with Fonzie or Danny Zuko for everybody.
My neighborhood in the 60s was full of baby boomer kids. We played games outside together, rode bikes together, and other adventures. But there was one kid in our neighborhood, a little older than me, who was never asked to join in. To this day, I don’t know his real name. We just called him Woody, which I learned years later may have been a derogatory nickname. In today’s world, you might say that Woody had learning disabilities. Woody’s family was also quite poor. I am not sure if Woody ever attended school. Back then there likely would not have been special education services that he required. Those weren’t the good old days for kids like him. Michiganders should be proud that Gerald Ford signed into law what would later become the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act but not until 1975. A year later, William Milliken signed the Michigan Mandatory Special Education Act.
The late 60s and early 70s was a time of turmoil. Even though the Civil Rights Act had passed earlier in the decade, in my public high school there were less than a handful of Black kids. A rural community, there were a few more Latino kids. In the early 60s, one of my neighbors was involved in a summer festival’s amateur act in which the actors dressed up in vaudeville costumes and black face. I remember his being upset when in the mid-1960s the Saginaw NAACP complained about the black face actors. That complaint brought about a good change, the end of black face at our summer festival even if it resulted in my neighbor giving up his amateur acting. Are we not better off learning how black face acting was and is offensive?
Legislators and the Governor in Michigan appear to be on the precipice of passing changes to Michigan’s Elliot-Larsen Civil Right Act. For the first time these changes would add civil rights protections for the LGBT community. I believe this is positive change. In Matthew 22, Jesus says to “love your neighbor as yourself”. To me, offering civil rights protections to all Michiganders seems to fit nicely with Jesus’s teaching of what is most important.
I do understand that conservative religious leaders object to the proposed change in Michigan’s law. Their biggest objection appears to be about additional protections for religious institutions even though religion is mentioned more than thirty times in the act. I am no constitutional legal expert but do respect sincere religious beliefs. Still, I find it difficult to believe that this change to Michigan’s civil rights law poses any serious challenge to conservative religious institutions. In 2018, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a baker could not be forced to bake a cake for a same sex couple. I can’t believe that courts now could force a church or religious school to alter beliefs, teaching, employment or enrolling practices.
Civil rights and religious freedom can and will co-exist even if some tensions remain. Yes, to the “Ch-ch-changes” and expansion of Elliot-Larsen.
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