Our world is one of pied beauty

Let's welcome, not condemn, human diversity

I’ve got the Merlin bird ID app on my phone, and I’ve been amazed at the variety of calls that can come from one species. Like all of nature, birds express themselves in variety.

Everything is abundance and profusion in the natural world. Even harsh environments like deserts go to extremes, from 50-foot tall saguaro cacti in Arizona to thousand-year-old biological soil crust in Utah.

Twenty years ago, when I was working at the Post-Star, I wrote a column about the fight over acceptance of homosexuality, headlined “Diversity reflects God’s glory,” which relied for proof on the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th century English poet and Jesuit priest.

Here is his poem “Pied Beauty” in its entirety:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

Diversity, I argued, is an expression of God, and, like Hopkins, we can see the evidence of that everywhere.

Or, if you prefer to leave God out of it, diversity is natural, whether in the finery and adornments we display or the mates we choose or other ways we express our diverse natures.

Now we are in the midst of another national campaign of suppression, this time against people who express themselves in gender nonconforming fashion. A whole range of behaviors, from cross-dressing to transitioning to shopping, are under attack, with restrictions of gender-based health care, removal of books from libraries and relocation of rainbow Pride displays to the back of Target stores, following threats against employees.

Although Target executives showed a lack of spine, it’s hard to fault them in a country where men with grievances have, time and again, expressed their pitiful confusion through mass murder.

The threat of violence lies just below the surface of protests against inclusion and acceptance of trans and gender-nonconforming people. The language is extreme: Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, called books that address LGBT issues “pornography”; and Linda Clark, a recent (unsuccessful) candidate for the Lake George school board, called such books “disgusting.”

Having these books on the shelf and treating with respect the young people who read them are cast as “indoctrinations” of children. The rhetoric is alarmist, because a sense of emergency is required to justify the harm being done to children who don’t conform to traditional gender roles. They are the victims of this unnecessary crusade.

Sex and gender take all kinds of forms in the natural world.

Twenty years ago, the growing cultural prominence of gays and lesbians, as they emerged from the shadow of prejudice, led to a backlash. But the backlash collapsed when more and more people realized that people they loved were gay.

Now we are in the backlash phase versus people who are transgender and non-binary, and it has extended even to expressions previously embraced, like drag shows.

It would be wonderful to jump straight from here to acceptance, to open our arms to everyone LGBTQ and welcome them as the family members they are.