This little light of ours

It's summer, right? That time of year when the darkness is supposed to seem as though it lives in fear of the ever-lengthening light?
Funny. At least in some ways, this past week has felt as cold and dark as the worst part of early December.
For starters, Jamie Phillips-Fox has left us, succumbing to an unexpected heart attack at the young age of 53. It's a cliche that only the good die young. We at BTL wish that, just this once, that cliche hadn't been proven.
In Lansing, a state representative took the stand at a recent committee hearing in order to push "a decision on morality" – the "morality," in this case, being a bill that would allow the state's adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTs while keeping not only their licenses but state funding as well. In the process, Rep. John Stahl took the worst tactics from the Bush Administration playbook – insulting pro-gay family activists and even turning off the microphone when Sean Kosofsky tried to speak sense to power.
Funny, isn't it – the religious right doesn't want their tax dollars going for things they find morally repugnant, but our community is supposed to go on happily paying for agencies and programs that actively discriminate against us using religion as their excuse.
Speaking of that mythical beast, the separation of church and state, the ACLU is hoping to investigate the showing of a highly reactionary Christian play that may have included extreme anti-gay viewpoints at two northern Michigan public schools.
And so it goes. Between the impersonal forces of fate and the very personal forces of hatred, it can be hard to feel like the sun is ever going to come up again.
But, like LGBT activists, the sun is stubborn. No matter how dark things look to us, that sun will come poking through our windows to remind us that light does, indeed, go on.
And we're happy to say that light was to be found in abundance during Memorial Day weekend in another part of northern Michigan, where a contingent of campers from the Ruth Ellis Center were given the gift of discovering a childhood many of them never had – courtesy of the Ann Arbor YMCA, no less.
Later this month, our community will come together at the Pride Banquet to celebrate our best and brightest. Among the Spirit of Detroit winners, we find two individuals who lost their jobs for the "crime" of being gay – and got up the next day, and the next, and went on to make successes of their lives.
Yes, we still have a whole lot of fightin' to do. But through our grief and our sorrow and our righteous anger, we have to hold on to the hope and the knowledge that tomorrow's light will come.
Now, get out there and do some good today. For yourself and for our community. Remember, one of our community's brightest "little lights," Jamie Phillips-Fox, has gone out, and we've all got to make up for that loss of light. She wouldn't want it any other way.