I knew a young man who washed dishes at our banquet hall at Eden Seattle.
He was quiet, diligent, the kind of person who shows up early and stays late. Most of my visitors never noticed him. But I think about him often because of what he carried here, and what it cost for him to arrive.
He is from Iraq. And he watched his father be murdered.
Not by strangers. Not in a war, in any conventional sense. His father was killed because he refused an order rooted in an extremist interpretation of religious law to shoot his own son for being gay. The father said no. He chose his child. And he paid for that choice with his life.
I do not tell this story to shock you. I tell it because it is the story we keep turning away from. It is the story behind statistics, the policy debates, the political abstractions.
A father chose love. The world punished him for it.
I am the Presiding Chaplain of the Universal Life Church here in Seattle. Over the years, we have hired more than fifty refugees, many of them gay men and women who came to this country not chasing opportunity but fleeing death. We found jobs. We gave them stability. And somewhere along the way, most importantly, we found family.
Collaborating with gay refugees and asylum seekers at the Universal Life Church, I have heard dozens of these stories firsthand. Each one is different in its details—different countries, different faiths used as justification, different forms of violence—but identical in what they cost the person telling it. You do not need statistics when you have sat across from someone and watched them find the words for what happened to them.
Numbers Don’t Lie
Still, the numbers are worth sitting with. At least sixty-two countries currently maintain laws criminalizing consensual same-sex activity, with punishments ranging from imprisonment to the death penalty. In 2024, seven of the top ten countries of origin for refugees globally had laws criminalizing homosexuality. And even when gays refugees reach safer ground, they are often shunned or attacked again—sometimes by the very communities they hoped would protect them.
Research from institutions like the Kinsey Institute, along with reporting across outlets such as MSNBC, points to a broader truth: awareness and acceptance are growing, especially among younger generations. The future is bending toward understanding. But in too many places, that future has not yet arrived.
I do not say any of this lightly. These are people who had lost everything—their countries, their communities, in some cases, their own families. People for whom the simple act of loving another person had been a death sentence or a prison sentence. What we offered was not charity. It was the basic human thing: a place to belong.
Who I Am
I should tell you who I am.
My name is George Freeman, and I am bisexual. Not as a political identity. Not as a talking point. As the actual, lived reality of my life. I tell you this not because it is an important thing about me, but because it shapes how I see this moment and why I cannot stay quiet about it.
I have never feared for my life because of who I love. That is a privilege I do not take lightly. The young man washing dishes in my kitchen did not have that privilege. Neither do the thousands of others still living in countries where the wrong kind of love gets you thrown from a building, imprisoned, or hunted by the people who are supposed to protect them.
Here is the contradiction that keeps me up at night:
Scott Bessent, the current secretary of the treasury, is openly gay. Former Mayor, Pete Buttigieg has served at the highest levels of government. These men have been trusted with the infrastructure and economy of the most powerful nation on earth. America did not merely tolerate their identity; it elevated them.
And yet, in dozens of countries around the world, men exactly like them are being prosecuted and persecuted for being exactly who they are. Men who, in another life, in another country, might have run cabinet departments and given speeches at Harvard. Instead, they are running toward us—toward asylum, toward the hope that America means what it says.
We cannot celebrate gay leadership at home and ignore gay persecution abroad. That is not a political position. It is a basic test of coherence.
A Grave Betrayal
The people who came here—the ones we hired, the ones still waiting in camps or hiding in cities that want them gone—they believed in America before America believed in them. Many of them worked alongside the State Department, translated for our troops, and protected our diplomats. They stood with us when it was dangerous to do so. They made a bet on this country.
To turn them away now is not a policy choice. It is a grave betrayal.
I am not asking anyone to abandon their faith. I am not asking anyone to abandon their values. Believe what you believe. Worship how you worship. That freedom is real, and it matters.
But freedom of religion has never meant freedom to harm. No doctrine, however ancient, however sincerely held, grants the right to destroy another human being for loving someone. The moment a belief system becomes a weapon pointed at a person’s life, it has crossed a line that no culture, no tradition, and no God I would recognize should defend.
We should also be honest about something difficult. When people enter the United States, they are not just entering a country—they are entering a constitutional promise. That promise includes the safety and dignity of gay people. No one should be admitted who intends to violate that basic standard. Not because of what they believe privately, but because of what they are willing to do to another human being.
The Arc of History
As the United States prepares to host the world on stages as large as the Olympic Games, this question will not stay contained at our borders. It will define who we are on the global stage. Canada, Mexico, and the United States share more than geography—we share a responsibility to set a standard: that no one is harmed for who they love./
There is a dishwasher in Seattle whose father died so that he could live.
I think about that man—the father—often. The moment he made his choice. I do not know what he believed about God, or about his son’s sexuality, or about what waited for him after. I only know what he did. He chose his child. In the last moment that mattered, he chose love.
That is the standard. Not legislation. Not ideology. Just that: when it counts, do you choose the person in front of you?
The arc is moving. Slowly, unevenly, sometimes backward—but moving. The next generation is less afraid, more open, more willing to choose love over fear. The question is whether our laws, our borders, and our courage will catch up to them.
America is being asked that question right now. Not abstractly, not philosophically, but in the form of actual human beings at actual borders, carrying actual trauma, asking whether the country they believed in will open the door.
I know what the right answer is.
I hope we do too.
