The hours and days following September 11 couldn't have been more different for us both. Penny lives in San Francisco and pastors the 550-member Metropolitan Community Church. The Church was open day and night for a week following the attacks on the World Trade Towers and Pentagon, providing comfort and a home for hundreds of people seeking community and a context. Kerry lives in a small rural town, south of San Francisco. She watched the news unfold in the town's only bar, crowded with migrant workers and ranchers. The 50 miles separating one town from the other might well have been a continent.

Now six months later, we find ourselves still recovering emotionally from the events of September 11. We did not lose friends, loved ones or family (although our friends and colleagues did). We remained physically safe in our homes, but September 11 jarred us in ways from which we have yet to heal.

As queer people, we have never felt particularly safe as individuals or as part of the collective queer tribe. As a Jew and as a Christian, as two working class women now entrenched in the upper middle class, as lesbian feminists, as white women, we view the world now in many of the ways we did before September 11 - through the lens of otherness - the looking glass of race, gender, religion, class, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Today, as six months ago, we remain concerned that many among us do not have adequate shelter and healthcare, that too many of us do not make a living wage that our children's schools are substandard and under-funded, and that life-saving drugs are not readily available to those with chronic or life-threatening illnesses. We remain concerned that too many of us are pulled over for driving or flying while black or brown. Still others face harassment, physical violence and discrimination on the street, at their place of worship, or at their workplace for the color of their skin or their perceived religion. We remain concerned that those gay, lesbian and bisexual people that serve in our military are at risk, that not all who wish to serve can, and that the blood of our gay, bisexual and Haitian brothers is automatically screened from the blood supply.

But more than this, we are concerned that there are too many among us who are ridiculed or threatened for asking questions, for speaking their truths, and for believing in a worldwide nonviolent movement for social justice and social change. As the so-called war on terrorism grows with planned strikes in Georgia, Yemen and the Philippines, it is up to each of to ask our government to be accountable for its actions. As the number of detainees held without charge or trial in American jail cells remains constant, it is up to us to ask our government the hard questions. From America's largest cities to its rural towns, a government that uses patriotism to silence its critics silences each of us.

As people of faith, we have been sustained in these last six months by our passion for justice. The places where our edges are healing are a little more jagged than they were six months ago. But our faith in nonviolence, our faith in those that ask questions, and our faith in our community sustain us.

Rev. Dr. G. Penny Nixon is the senior pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. Kerry Lobel staffs the Lesbian Equity Foundation of Silicon Valley and is the former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

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