My church has been working on an “Inclusion” statement for the past few years. The statement is written above the entrance to the sanctuary now, but the pastor wishes to have a vote on “Inclusion” that goes further than the statement. I’m not sure of what he is talking about, but in a few meetings he and his wife have made us aware of his belief in same-sex marriage. The church now opposes it. The rest of the “Inclusion” part puzzles me because I never saw anyone excluded from our church or any other church that I attended.
Here’s a little history of my life and the inclusion of people that are in a different place than I am. Many of them, gay or lesbian. In 1959, I took a summer job in a laboratory that supplied both bacteriology for the county and medical technology for the local hospital. While the lab director was a physician, the person in charge was an older lady who also was the bacteriologist. Miss B hired and fired the technicians, and she hired me for the summer. During that summer, I worked in all phases of the lab and became sufficient in most procedures, so I was asked to take emergency calls at a satellite lab in the Hamilton Community Hospital on both evenings and weekends after I returned to school. I did, and met Miss T who ran the satellite lab. Later in my med tech career, I would cover for her during her vacations. Miss T lived in a house with Miss B and had for many years. No one ever said anything about the arrangement and to this day I cannot say that either was a lesbian.
A few years before, I worked at a large factory, and one of my fellow workers wore clear nail polish to work. He said that colored polish caused too many stares. We laughed and joked with him, and we considered him a fellow worker and friend. He was included. Over the years, I have had gay and lesbian people work under my supervision and as peers, and I never did hear of anyone trying to exclude these people. They came to work and lived their lives as they wished without any interference that I was aware of. Most shared the events of their lives and vacations as did the other workers. All of these people were included and part of our immediate society.
At 80 years old, I have many friends who are part of the LGBT community and consider them as any other of my friends and relatives. They are included and never have been excluded from me or anyone that I know. Each may have experienced some forms of prejudice or bias, and so have I and most every other person on this earth. We have a habit of picking and choosing our friends and people we want to associate with, but no one has ever been asked to leave my church because they belonged to this community that they have been put into. There seems to be more hatred politically with many, and this seems to be OK. People are being excluded in conversations and friendships and even in our supposedly open universities. We have teachers and professors trying to persuade students in political matters, and this seems to be accepted; but, hatred is accepted in my church if it is aimed at the right area such as conservativism. Suddenly we have been excluded.
The left-leaning liberals have divided and conquered. They have told the LGBT community that they are being separated as a group, and the liberals have ridden in to save them. Once again a group of people who have something in common have been put into a group and excluded from society for the express purpose of being saved by a political group to gain their support. We found this during the Johnson era when the poor, with many of them being African Americans, separated out as the poor whom we needed to help. We then built government housing and gave them enough money to exist on but told them that if they tried to get a job and support themselves we would remove their government support. Instead of helping a group of people that was excluded from society, we made their plight permanent and, years later, we have helped very few climb out of poverty. The accomplishment of this endeavor was to build a large voting bloc for the Democratic Party. It has always amazed me that people vote for the ones who have re-enslaved them. This is part of the Swamp that needs to be drained.
Back to my church and its endeavor to include people who have never been excluded except when they wished. My question is how do we identify the church members who look at kiddie porn or the potential molesters, so we can start to bring them into part of the Inclusion exercise. It is impossible to identify everyone who is a little bit different from me and try to exclude them to gain their trust when we re-include them. People are part of our culture, and the differences do bring many challenges to many of us but to exclude any one of the people on this earth requires us to become God and judge them. I believe I have never been given that job or ability.
-30-