Recently, I saw a headline: 4 states offering Pride Month alternatives that celebrate family.” As if the celebration of LGBTQ Pride Month neither celebrates families nor requires an alternative celebration to better recognize families in different ways.
The words we choose matter, and that headline does a lot of work in a very short space. It implies that Pride Month and family are somehow in opposition. That to celebrate LGBTQ people and communities is to turn away from some sacred notion of what family is or should be. That the families LGBTQ people build, tend, sacrifice for and love with their whole hearts don’t quite count.
That implication is wrong. And we need to name it clearly.
Ben Huelskamp
Pride Month always has been about family. It’s about the grandmother who marched in the streets so her gay grandson wouldn’t have to be afraid. It’s about the two men who’ve raised three children together, who coach Little League, bring meals to sick neighbors and show up to church every Sunday. It’s about the transgender man whose parents stood by him when it wasn’t easy, whose siblings call him brother, whose kids call him dad. It’s about the lesbian pastor whose hands were shaking when she told her congregation she’s queer and was met not with condemnation, but rapturous applause. It’s about chosen families, those fierce networks of belonging LGBTQ people have forged, often because their families of origin turned them away.
Chosen family is still family. Adoptive family is still family. Multigenerational family is still family. The Bible not only acknowledges these facts; it attests to families in multiple forms throughout.
But here’s where the legislative framing in these four states moves from misleading to something more troubling. While Utah and Arkansas called their “alternative” month “Fidelity Month,” Indiana and Tennessee went beyond Pride Month and the queer community to name an even darker observance. They declared June “Nuclear Family Month,” a specific and exclusive category that defines family as one husband, one wife and children.
At once that’s a declaration against an enormous swath of families including heterosexual single parents (regardless of how they became single parents), blended families, grandparents raising grandchildren, childless couples, multigenerational households and other family configurations that are different but no less valid than the rosy picture of mom, dad, kids and the quintessential white picket fence.
In fact, the nuclear family, as a cultural ideal, is less ancient than we tend to assume. It only became the ideal in postwar mid-20th-century America, shaped more by suburban economics and Cold War politics than by anything in the biblical text. The families we actually meet in Scripture are extended, complicated, blended, and often scandalous by tidy modern standards.
Jacob had children by four women. Ruth was a Moabite widow who bound herself in covenant love to another woman. The early church described itself as a household that cut across lines of blood, status and ethnicity. Jesus said, “‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’”
“They draw a line around it and call everything outside the perimeter something less.”
That’s a pretty expansive definition of family for someone whose name these proclamations implicitly invoke.
Of course, none of this is to say different-gender-parent households aren’t valuable. But there’s a difference between affirming something and weaponizing it; between celebrating one kind of family and using the machinery of state government to declare other kinds of family invisible.
That’s what these proclamations aim to do. They don’t just lift up a family structure they value. They draw a line around it and call everything outside the perimeter something less.
For those of us doing ministry at the intersection of faith and LGBTQ lives, this isn’t abstract. We watch LGBTQ people of faith navigate rejection, exclusion and erasure in the name of family values, often by the very institutions that should be sheltering them. We walk alongside families who love their LGBTQ children fiercely and feel the sting of being told their households don’t warrant a proclamation. We accompany people building lives of extraordinary faithfulness and devotion who are told, month after month, that their love is a threat.
Pride Month doesn’t threaten families or any definition of family. It expands our vision of what family can look like and always has looked like in a world where love takes more forms than any governor’s proclamation can contain.
The Jesus I follow, born of a virgin, taken into the household and family of his earthly father, and who called God Abba, seemed to know that too. The table he built and the circle he drew always was larger and more expansive than the people in charge wanted it to be.
This June, I’m proud to celebrate every family gathered around that ever-widening table.
Ben Huelskamp serves as executive director of LOVEboldly and as pastor of Blue Ocean Faith Columbus. He is an ordained member of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries.