Fairness - The Commentary

The nation watched with surprised shock back on January 21 st at the sight of a national religious leader actually standing up for those she understands her Bible says to treat with mercy in a public rebuke to Donald Trump while he sat in a front row pew. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C. in a 15 minute sermon at a national prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral showed a seldom seen courage by looking toward the new President while saying: "Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives…." "The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and m...

Don’t get me wrong: I like all the letters that could be added to become LGBTQI+. In fact, I think there should be more – the more the merrier. Now, that will drive copy editors and those who are worried that they won’t know what the short-hand version is for referring to all those souls represented with even more letters even crazier. There are people already complaining about the length of the lists now. The problem for those who gripe about it is actually a fact of reality - there is so much diversity in the world about us. It seems obvious that Nature loves diversity . But the idea of diversity makes people who need to confine everything and everyone in nice, neat boxes uncomfortable. It’s hard to admit that hardly anyone fits into a couple of our familiar, settled categories. The reactionary response to those who embrace the latest science of gender and sexuality in which those old categories that were accepted about gender are exposed as obsolete is a current example. That we kno...