Dear Editor
Closed hearts, minds and souls…. Catastrophic things for us to waste as human beings; Christ’s Creations.
I had the wonderful opportunity of working for many years prior to my retirement from teaching with individuals with differing abilities, otherwise often labeled as developmentally disabled or delayed.
It quickly became apparent from my work that our shorthand labels for these beautiful human beings were really just an excuse for not connecting with them as just that; complicated, beautiful human beings placed here by God to teach us the true meaning of his love for us and his creation.
As human beings we’re all about labels. It just makes it simpler for us to categorize things and too often our fellow human beings: Jews, Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, Blondes, Blacks or Heterosexual, Homosexual, Bi-sexual, Transexual?
We are all God’s creation and we’re all different, because he has purposely made us so. How can you doubt it? He’s made us short and tall, dark and light, fast and slow, witty and taciturn, physically and/or cognitively adept and not so much so.
And we’re all placed here in this beautiful creation of his to interact as positively and morally as we possibly can with our fellow human beings and that wonderful and awe-inspiring creation of his to make all of our lives and that beautiful creation better and more perfect.
But let’s step away from the spiritual view to the material/scientific. Geneticists and developmental specialists have long known that genetics and natural or other types of mutations materially dictate that in every possible way, we as individual members of our species, differ across an extremely wide spectrum, in every possible way.
The above is obviously true of our gender and sexual identification as well. Genetically, a significant portion of us are physically and emotionally both “well-endowed” and thoroughly focused on fulfilling Christ’s wishes and our own, to propagate the species. Yay for us!
However, on both ends of the functional/emotional spectrum, a certain percentage of us are genetically either physically or emotionally just not functioning within mathematical “gender norms”.
How is it then in any possible way healthy, moral or Christian to tell a significant portion of humanity that they; pick one: should/must be ashamed of and/or should/must hide their functionality if it does no harm to any other human being?, should/must adapt to the “mechanics” of functionality of the mathematical and/or Christian norm if it does no harm to any other human being?, should/must live an abysmally tortured existence within a physicality that they see, in every possible way as alien when it absolutely does no harm to any other human being?
And here’s the kicker, think about it…. How many of us through hundreds of years of perceived and thoroughly indoctrinated “Christian” “normality” who have been told, at the risk of societal/community/family ostracism or even expulsion that they must comply with norms/legalities, have gone behind the back of family, school, community and/or society and potentially done harm to themselves and/or others because of these abysmal and ridiculously counterproductive and unchristian proscriptions?
And, lastly and most importantly, throughout those centuries, to the present day, to this very moment; how many God-blessed human beings have fallen victim to this depravity of anti-Christian exclusion, expulsion and ostracism and then passed on that harm irrevocably to their off-spring in a cascade of societal dysfunction and functional idiocy, to no purpose but fear and ignorance?
Jim Martin
Perryville
