We live in America

This week’s editorial in the Easterner takes a powerful stand against hate crime, and for the dignity and worth of ALL in our community. Mr. Casey, you rock.

Loudoun Easterner
August 9, 2006

Our land of opportunity and freedom

Last week the Easterner carried a news story about the hate crime in the Aldie area at a home southeast of Gilberts’s Corner. The crime was a quiet night-time attack on the homeowners – two men aged 52 and 54 who live together. Both men are respected members of the community. One is an ITT specialist with IBM; the other is a Fairfax County employee.

The attack involved: cutting down 70 saplings and uprooting 100 boxwood bushes that had been carefully planted by the homeowners, spraypainting “FAG” several times on the driveway, and spreading gasoline or some other accelerant on the grass to leave brown streaks in the normally well-cared-for lawn. The vandals took care not to awaken the homeowners, who did not discover the attack until they went out the next morning to pick up their newspaper.

The attack itself is a black eye on our entire community. We live in America, the land of opportunity and freedom and individual rights. We live in Virginia, not that far from the home of George Mason, one of our founding fathers, who wrote a Declaration of Rights that formed the basis for the Bill of Rights, our first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. Those stated rights have provided a basis for our country and our commonwealth to grow in its acceptance of individuals and to recognize diversity in our culture as having value, rather than as something to be burned, or hung, or chased away.

On the plus side, many of the neighbors of the two men reportedly have stopped in gestures of support and sympathy. Also on this page last week this crime drew a strong and appropriate response by David Weintraub, leader of Equality Loudoun. He wrote in part: “It is vital that the whole community be engaged to stop this hate in its tracks, and send a message to our local anti-gay activists that it will only backfire and hurt their campaign.”

Each of us can contribute to sending that message: first by simply accepting that diversity of all kinds has a proper place here in our community; then backing up that acceptance with your vote, with your treatment of others in your workplace or school or neighborhood. There are names, for example, that society no longer accepts to identify individuals of different races. Yet there are names in use today that discriminate against another group of individuals. One of them is “FAG.” Let’s drop that word and let’s be willing to remind others that the word is inappropriate and unacceptable in all contexts.