By: Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero
Over the past year, Florida’s rainbow crosswalks have been painted over by the state, one city at a time. Last October, Miami Beach’s iconic crosswalk on Ocean Drive was removed brick by brick at night by workers using an excavator. The city had not been warned. A crowd gathered across the street to chant Miami Beach, forever proud, while the bricks were carried away. This spring, the community gathered the salvaged pavers and reassembled them, brick by brick, in Lummus Park, where they now sit as a permanent installation. That is Pride in Motion.
For four Sundays this June, we will walk a series called Pride in Motion. We will move from shame toward wholeness, one Sunday at a time. We will begin where the wound begins, outside us, in the long pressure of being told, in countless small ways, that some parts of being human are not welcome here. We will sit with the long Florida tradition of coming back. We will listen to the inner voice that has internalized the world’s verdicts, and we will begin the slow work of taking our minds back. We will close on the last Sunday of June, with Pride. The embodied refusal to apologize for being here.
Pride began as a riot. The first one lasted six nights in the summer of 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York refused to be arrested for the crime of being who they were. The riot became a march. The march became a movement. The movement became a parade. The parade has, in some places, become a brand. And in this moment, in this country, Pride is being asked to remember that it was once a riot.
Pride is, at the deepest level, the slow, embodied refusal to apologize for being here. It is the long arrival into the self that the world has tried, in countless small ways, to teach a person not to be. Pride is a movement. Pride is a celebration. Pride is also a spiritual practice. The practice of integration. The practice of bringing every part of the self into the same room, the angry one, the tender one, the longing one, the small one, and letting all of them belong.
Pride matters because erasure is the strategy of those who fear plurality. When a flag is taken down, the city learns that it does not have to be welcoming. When a crosswalk is painted over, a generation learns that some people are easier to make invisible. When a book is pulled, the child learns that her story does not belong in the library. The cost of these small disappearances accumulates in the body, and it accumulates in the soul.
We are living through a season of social aggression and regression aimed at LGBTQ+ people. Laws are being passed that erase. Books are being pulled from shelves. Pronouns are being legislated. Symbols of belonging are being painted over in the night. Public officials are testing whether the country has the stomach to take rights away from a class of people who, less than a generation ago, had only barely begun to claim them.
I will not name the architects of this regression. Their names will not last. What lasts is the conscience of every person who refuses to forget, in their own circles of influence, that the dignity of another human being is not up for debate.
This is where pluralism comes in. Pluralism is one of the deepest promises of any free society. Pluralism is the conviction that many kinds of people can share one civic home. Many languages. Many faiths. Many histories. Many ways of loving. Many ways of becoming. One county. One community. One shared future.
For Unitarian Universalists, pluralism is not a slogan we put on a banner during the month of June. Pluralism is a theological commitment that runs to the floor of who we are. We believe, in the way our deepest tradition has always believed, that all people are created equal. Endowed by their Creator, by conscience, by life, by whatever name each of us gives to the source of human dignity, with the right to live freely and to pursue their own becoming.
To say that out loud, in this hour, in Florida, in 2026, is itself a quiet act of resistance. Representation matters because invisibility kills. The closeted teenager. The trans elder. The bisexual man at his own wedding. The drag performer in a state that has tried to legislate her off the stage. These are not abstractions. They are lives. They are people. They are bodies that have learned to read every room before they enter it. When we make a place where they can be seen, we are doing the work of justice.
So we will deliberately take this month to refuse the disappearance. We will tell the long Florida stories of queer resistance, from a 1937 nightclub to a 2025 chalk drawing. We will hold up the dignity of every person, named and unnamed, who has had to fight to be here. We will sit with the wounds the world has made without flinching. We will move, together, toward wholeness.
Come walk these four Sundays with us. Whatever you carry. Whatever you have been told. Whoever you are, on the inside, on the days no one is watching.
We will rise together. We will protect one another. We will keep building a future where all of us can shine.