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Orlando’s Civility Pledge Should Inspire Us All
The Hill - May 29, 2026
Like Jews worldwide, Orlando philanthropist Alan Ginsburg was deeply shaken by Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 and took hundreds hostage.
Soon, numerous elite U.S. university campuses erupted, displaying anti-Israel rhetoric sometimes spilling into crude antisemitic tropes. Ginsburg felt civil discussion’s decline into polarized shouting matches was unhealthy in a city of tourism and theme parks. So, he contacted the Rev. Joel Hunter, former pastor of Northland, a 20,000-member suburban megachurch.
In early 2024, Hunter and the Ginsburg Family Foundation invited 150 civic and community leaders to devise a way forward. Their Central Florida Pledge aimed to help build “America’s most welcoming community” and keep “Central Florida a safe community for all who live here and for future generations.” It read as follows:
“I will lead by example—treating all people with dignity and respect, especially those with whom I disagree.
“I will refrain from inflammatory words and actions, and actively support those being attacked.
“I will report threatening incidents of hate and violence to 800-423-TIPS (8477).
“I will educate myself about all forms of discrimination, including antisemitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and help others in my circle of influence to do the same.”
So far, 6,000 people have signed, including about a thousand from area high schools and colleges.
“The pledge has made a real impact especially with young people,” said Rabbi Steven Engel, emeritus rabbi of the Congregation of Reform Judaism. A founding pledge member, Engel helped involve the interfaith community.
Pledge members applied their credo in March 2025, after fundamentalist Christians demonstrated at several Orlando area churches, including a gay congregation and a gay-affirming United Methodist Church. Inside and outside, protesters disrupted Sunday services, calling Joy Metropolitan Ministries a “synagogue of sin.” Hunter and about 70 pledge-signers came out in support.
In response, the Rev. Terri Steed Pierce told the Orlando Sentinel, “It meant a lot to me, but it meant even more to my congregation when they walked in to see a bunch of people they’ve never seen before standing outside saying, ‘You’re going to have to go through us to get to them,'” she said. “And ninety-nine percent of those people standing outside my gay church were not gay.”
The two pledge founders, Ginsburg and Hunter, are ideally suited for this effort.
Ginsburg, a concert promoter turned affordable-housing developer, is a major Orlando philanthropist. His Ginsburg Family Foundation’s many causes include two Orlando hospitals, helping finance the University of Central Florida’s Hillel center, plus $6 million for a new, downtown Holocaust museum. He also co-founded and sponsors summer “Seeds of Peace” programs involving young Israelis and Palestinians.
Hunter is hardly a typical Sunbelt preacher. A Midwesterner, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement kindled his ministry commitment. Then, in 2016, the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed 49 and wounded 58 in Orlando galvanized Hunter.
“We knew we had gay people in the congregation,” Hunter told a reporter at the time. “But there was no one who felt like they could reach out to us, apparently. … And so, I went to the congregation and said, ‘I’m going to do a self-examination as to whether or not I have been culpable by not speaking to a broad love of all our neighbors, especially the gay community.'”
Still, he told the Sentinel, “I’m a conservative evangelical Christian, for crying out loud. And I have not had to sacrifice one iota of what I believe” in developing the pledge. “But I have been able to figure out how I can best respect other people in what they believe.”
According to Sue Wasiolek, a faculty participant in Duke University’s Civil Discourse Project, “Efforts like the Central Florida Pledge work because they move civility from an abstract ideal into a lived, public commitment. When people see neighbors showing up across lines of difference, it reshapes what’s possible in divided communities.”
“Born out of crisis, The Central Florida Pledge became a community-driven movement,” Ginsburg told me in an interview. It’s “a simple step the community can take to encourage widespread safety, dignity and respect, and help make Central Florida America’s most welcoming community by neighbor.”
Durham, N.C.-based journalist and author Mark I. Pinsky covered religion for the Orlando Sentinel for 15 years.
