We, the bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, join with the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in decrying the action of the National Park Service in removing references to the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s transgender identity from their website and shortening the acronym LGBTQ+ to LGB.
Pauli Murray’s struggles with transgender identity are well documented. Efforts to render this aspect of their life and identity invisible is an affront to the LGBTQ+ community and an assault on Pauli Murray’s deepest convictions about the indivisibility of human rights. Pauli Murray wrote that “true emancipation lies in the acceptance of the whole past, in deriving strength from all my roots.” Those words stand as a rebuke to those who would curtail the quest for human wholeness and the pursuit of love and reconciliation that were the hallmarks of Pauli Murray’s own life and ministry.
“As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring heirs, according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:27-29)
