Quotes About Diversity

I think there are a whole host of things that are civil rights, and then there are other things - such as traditional marriage - that, I think, express a community's concern and regard for a particular institution.

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.

Our troops come from every corner of this country—they are black, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American. They are Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim. And, yes, we know that some of them are gay. Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America.

There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.

Our stories may be singular, but our destination is shared.

We are all different. Yet we are all God's children. We are all united behind this country and the common cause of freedom, justice, fairness, and equality. That is what unites us.

What I know and most of them do not yet is that even people who belong to the same religion do not agree about what they mean when they say 'God.

Now Ed and I operate by our first amendment to the Golden Rule, which is not "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," but "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them (instead of thinking they are just like you).

Contrary to popular opinion, all religions are not alike. Their followers see the world in very distinct ways. Their understandings of the human condition proceed from different assumptions, leading them to propose different remedies. If I had been able to resist the wisdom they offered me - if I had been able to keep my Christian glasses on, so that I only saw what those prescription lenses allowed me to see - then I might have emerged unchanged. But that is now how it went for me.

Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.

One of the quietest revolutions in Religion 101 follows a student's recognition that he or she has a worldview, a particular way of viewing reality that it is not the only way. A worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean.

Once, at the end of a field trip to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, the imam ended his meeting with students by saying, 'Our deepest desire is not that you become Muslim, but that you become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best person you can be. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Thank you for coming.' Then he was gone, leaving me with a fresh case of holy envy.

The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, 'We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.

I had lived so long in the mainstream that I never even though about how I sounded from the margins

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: The degree to which we believe our faith is makes us human is the same degree with which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: the degree to which we believe our faith is what makes us human is the same degree to which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community.

Another favorite hymn mourns Israel's lonely exile from the Son of God. Another years for a future in which every knee will bow to Jesus. Another urges Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war. When I imagined singing it with a Muslim or Hindu student sitting next to me, my voice dried up. It was a song for insiders, not outsiders. If I had learned anything from going on all of those class field trips, it was how religious language sounds to outsiders, and how much that matters.

As much as I admire the brilliance of the Jewish Talmud—especially the way it hallows sacred debate across the centuries—I cannot have it. It belongs to those in whose lifeblood it was written. As much as my soul leans toward the whirling of the Sufis who bring heaven to earth with their ethereal spinning, I cannot have that either. It belongs to those who have devoted their lives to the love of Allah.

Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.

The truth is, men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus. We are all earthlings whose penises and vaginas came from exactly the same type of fetal tissue. This is why, in addition to penises and vaginas, we also have a wide spectrum of intersex genitals, which medical science is only now slowly coming to accept as 'normal.

The nice thing about a round table is that it can seat an almost infinite number of people, as King Arthur found out long ago.

Everything in the world is part of nature. All the creatures, even the weird ones, are just figuring out how to grow, how to change. How to survive. And maybe they need some help, but if they do, that's okay. I think they'll be okay.