As you may have read, there is someone posting to this blog under the pseudonym John Brown. Though I have little doubt this is a caring, sincere person, I have declined to engage in dialogue with this person and with anyone who posts under a false name and e-mail. I want to let you know why.

Electronic communication seems sometimes to naturally foster confrontational speech. People who would never feel free or able to use such language face to face can hide behind the anonymity of the computer screen. I’m tired of that kind of communication. I want to engage in real, person to person dialogue around important issues. Honesty is required for positive, productive communication.

As well, I know that I have an abrupt style of communication when I’m passionate about an issue. An anonymous post allows me to be more abrupt than I would probably be if I knew the identity of the person posting. I’m trying hard to tailor my own speech to be more caring and uplifting. I’m currently in Clinical Pastoral Education at a local hospital, and it has been pointed out to me that I need to work on this. I’m trying. This is one vehicle for that effort.

So, any of you may feel free to respond to Brown and other anonymous posters, but I will not do so until Brown sends me an e-mail with her/his identity. Thanks for your understanding.

We flew in this evening from GA. I’m sorry I didn’t post more, but I just couldn’t bring myself to pay $10 per day for access at the hotel, and I was too busy to post much during the day.

I want to spill my guts about the GA, but I also want to save some stuff for my July 13th sermon on the topic. So I’ll tell you generally that I am thrilled to be a Unitarian Universalist after these meetings. All the good things that spring from our liberal theology were on full display. I attended workshops on becoming an officially LGBT welcoming congregation, on the loss of our civil liberties after 9/11 (this one featured a senator and an attorney who were absolutely fascinating) and on UU theology in the Philippines, India and Transylvania (which acutally has a Unitarian catechism which asks Unitarian youths to confess belief in ‘our father God, Jesus the greatest among the sons of God, and the Holy Spirit). I visited booths sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship, the HUUmanists, the UU Mystics and Buddhists and the Harvard Divinity School. I spoke with the Harvard Humanist chaplain, Forrest Church (a UU minister and prolific author who is dying of cancer and writing about the process along the way) and Rebecca Ann Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry and co-author of the newly-released “Saving Paradise.”

Best of all, I bought 10 books, including a children’s book detailing the true story of two male penguins who partnered and built a nest in their zoo habitat. The two were given an egg and sat on it until it hatched, then took care of the young one just like all the other penguin couples. I also bought Marcus and Josie a book about the teachings of Jesus and a book of Zen teachings for children.

But if you only click one link, click this one. This guy was AMAZING.

We’re truly diverse. We’re truly accepting. And we’re truly, though imperfectly, trying our best as an association, to live out our faith. I’m realizing that I’ve found my people. For one who has been searching for a long time, that’s an amazing feeling.

I’m in Fort Lauderdale through Monday attending General Assembly. I am also volunteering a few hours each day (registration is free if you volunteer), working at the registration table. It’s fun, and I’ve met plenty of nice people. I’m actualy using a registration computer to write this post. We’re not so busy today, and there’s no way I’m paying the $10 per day my hotel charges for Internet access.

I’ve been impressed with the compassion and kindness of the attendees. There was an issue in the runup to GA because the conference center is in a Homeland Security secure zone and IDs are required to enter the facility. That requirement excludes anyone who doesn’t have IDs from attending our events, including the public Sunday morning service. Attendance is down this year (about 3,000 people here as of now with a normal average of 4,000), and that controversy is one of the reasons. However, there have been reminders to treat the security employees well and a few reports of extra kindness to these people.

Here are a few of my favorite parts so far:

* The morning sermon today was given by Rev. Sarah Lammert, who spoke about being generous with our language. She discussed making room for people who disagree with us, not insisting on the banishment of God language if we’re ateists, etc. There was much applause when Rev. Lammert suggested that it’s far past time for us to get over such petty theological arguments.

* One man spoke about his advocacy on behalf of the workers who pick the tomatoes we eat at restaurants and buy at grocery stores. He was named by Rolling Stone the young activist of the year. He and his group have convinced Burger King and McDonald’s to pay 1.5 cents more per pound to help increase farm conditions. He said they’re still working on Subway, Chipotle and Wal-Mart. None of the three has yet agreed to pay a little more to improve conditions for impoverished workers.

* The annual report of President William Sinkford was fantastic. He read letters from new UUs who have come to UUism because of the association’s advertising in TIME. It feels to me like this growth campaign, the first national campaign since the 70s, is working, and he reinforced that feeling. As well, Sinkford stated clearly that although the UUA has opposed the war, we support our troops wholeheartedly. In fact, 13 new UU military chaplains are currently either in training or on duty. Six of them were at the service and received a standing ovation.

It’s hot as hell down here. I got a sunburn through sunscreen the first day. However, this is a nice city with a great beach. I’ll be exploring the beach during a lull in GA activity tomorrow. Peace!

Here’s a song that was actually written by Iris. Awesome lyrics. It’s a real UU type tune.

OK, so my next post will be from Fort Lauderdale. A good friend sent me a link to an Iris Dement song on YouTube, and it sent me mulling over the rest of her stuff there. Check out one of my favorites above. Warning: It’s a little earthy in parts.

This is my take on our need for bias crime legislation in the Hoosier state. It was also my sermon on Sunday. Watch all this week, as I’ll be posting from the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale. See you then!

According to the FBI, which tracks statistics on bias crime, a bias or hate crime is “a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.[1]” Almost every year for the past 10 years, the FBI has reported over 9,000 such offenses. They happen all over the United States. They happen in Indiana.

Just a few weeks ago, Kyle Flood and several other Ball State students were leaving Mo’s Tavern in Muncie. They were celebrating the end of the semester and the end of the Obama campaign for which they had volunteered. Walking out of the bar, Flood, a gay man, and his friends were approached by someone who began screaming anti-gay slurs.

Jessica, Flood’s friend, tried to get the stranger to leave the group of four alone, but he knocked her to the ground. When Kyle ran over to help his friend, the man punched him, leaving him with a corneal abrasion and a swollen black eye. In a recent blog post, Flood said:

“Sitting in the emergency room, I could only think of how ignorant our attackers were. These men thought they were doing themselves good by attacking us. Calling us faggots, throwing punches, and even putting a female in a chokehold must have provided a much-needed rush for their masculinity. We were not helpless victims, but we were no match to their attack.

My wounds will heal. People will go about their lives as usual. Most will forget what happened that night. How long will we wait until this happens again? How many times will something like this need to occur before someone will realize it needs to be stopped? When will the Christian Right realize that they’d be better Christians by helping fellow human beings?

The support I’ve received from friends, family, and even complete strangers has been amazing; however, I don’t want to stop now. I’m sharing my story because I think it is wrong that my attackers will not be prosecuted as they should. If someone says: “I hate gays so much that I’m going to attack one,” there is no reason that it should not be treated as a hate crime. A majority of states have hate crime legislation and it is time that Indiana stands up and joins the ranks. Do we need to wait for another Aaron Hall before Indiana thinks something needs to be done? (www.blueindiana.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=2577)

Aaron Hall’s story takes place in the southern Indiana town of Crothersville. An 18-year-old, a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old said they felt threatened when one of them alleged he was approached in a sexual way by Hall at a drinking party. So the three did the first thing that came to mind. They waited for Hall. When he was alone, they kidnapped him and brutally beat him. They even snapped a cell phone photo of one of them hugging the badly-beaten and unconscious Hall and sent it to a friend.

The beating got worse. Hall was struck at least 75 times by one of the men’s boots. The three men dragged his body down a wooden staircase on which one of the men said Hall’s head bounced on every step. They put Hall into their vehicle and dumped him in a ditch. Hall crawled, naked, into a field, where he died. Later, the three men returned to the site, wrapped Hall’s body in a tarp and stored him in a garage, where the police later found him. The killers’ attorneys used what is called the ‘Gay Panic Defense,’ in which a person is said to go into a state of shock after being subjected to homosexuality.

Almost every state in the U.S. addresses such bias crimes with hate crime legislation, statutes which enhance the sentences attached to crimes committed because of bias. There are all sorts of different bias crime laws. There are regulations around the country including sections on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender. Indiana has none of these sentence enhancements. It’s important to ask ourselves why, when our neighbors are passing bias crime laws, Indiana is still refusing.

It isn’t because our lawmakers have better things to do. Bias crime legislation has been proposed and has been championed by Rep. Greg Porter and others. The legislation proposed would have lengthened the sentence of the criminal in cases in which the victim was proven to have been chosen on the basis of “color, creed, disability, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex of the injured individual or of the owner or occupant of the property.” But the legislation was defeated last year in the Indiana Statehouse.

Some of the opponents of bias crime legislation in Indiana have said that a bias rule would punish free speech and thought. On the surface, that argument may seem to have some heft. After all, most of us know people who tell a racist or homophobic joke now and then. Should those people be punished as criminals? I’ve heard arguments which make it seem that anyone who made a racist comment would be whisked off to a torture chamber to live out the rest of their days. Would a bias crime law create a bias crimes division in our local police departments, staffed with large, harsh people whose job it is to find racists and bring them to justice?

No one must fear that bias crime legislation would punish thought or speech, including  tasteless jokes. Bias crime legislation would enhance sentences when a crime has already been committed. Bias sentence enhancements wouldn’t be enacted until it had been proven to the prosecutor’s satisfaction that a person had committed a crime which fit bias crime criteria. No Bias Crimes Division would be seeking out bias offenders.

But, some will say, when we accuse someone of a bias crime we claim to know what they were thinking. How can we punish someone for what they were thinking when they committed a crime? Now, it is true that bias legislation thinks about motive. The court must know the reason you committed the crime before bias sentence enhancements are enacted. But the court considers motive in deciding between degrees of murder and manslaughter. Judging a person’s reason for committing a crime is nothing new. Our justice system is equipped to handle questions of criminal motivation.

Another argument against bias crime legislation is that crimes are already punished. A murder is punished with a murder sentence. Vandalism is punished under vandalism statues. Why do we need to create a separate classification of crime? Again, there’s good sense in this argument. It’s true that our justice system did, for instance, punish Aaron Hall’s killers. They’re going to jail. Why do we need to call a murder a bias crime? Isn’t it enough that these guys will receive sentences for murder?

Perhaps not. What we do with bias crime legislation is say that crimes against identity are crimes about which we as a society need to be especially concerned. That’s true because bias crimes, more than crimes motivated by greed or revenge, send messages of fear and intimidation to entire populations of people. Imagine, for instance, that a Muslim is attacked in Broad Ripple by persons who are shouting anti-Muslim rhetoric before the attack. And imagine that you’re a Muslim living in that neighborhood. You are threatened by implication. It becomes more challenging for you to go shopping, to enjoy an evening out with friends, to eat at a restaurant without fear that you could come to harm. This crime sends the message that, because of who you are, if you dare take to the streets, you could become the victim of a crime. Bias crime legislation sends a counter-message that we are human beings first, and that we refuse to put up with crimes which target persons because of identity.

Certainly we can fight bias crimes as individuals and as small communities. We can initiate neighborhood watches, we can offer education. But it seems to me we also need to say, together, as a state, as a nation, that we want to be rid of this sort of intimidation. The interdependent web of existence which links Caucasian and African-American, straight and gay, Christian and Jew and atheist reminds us that we’re all in this together. And bias crime legislation feels to me like our Hoosier community standing up against a type of crime which is against our most basic human principles. It is a collective effort to lessen the effects of religious and ethnic prejudice, racism and sexism and homophobia in our back yard. It is the majority standing up for the minority, which is the act that goes furthest in preserving our democracy.

We won’t all agree on the solution. I know that. I also know that I’m in a caring, thoughtful congregation. And I hope we can all work together toward lessening the number of bias crimes in our state, especially by letting our legislators know our thoughts on the issue. We need to say something about bias crime as a society. What are your opinions?

[1] www.fbi.gov/ucr/Cius_98/98crime/98cius16.pdf

The discussion this Sunday was promising and hopeful. Hope you enjoy the sermon and readings.

Einstein said, “Science without religion is lame; Religion without science is blind.” But the two have been blinding and maiming each other for a long, long time.

Pope Urban VIII got in one of religion’s most famous blows against science. As the church in the sixteenth century well knew, Jewish scripture reads: “Yahweh has set the earth on its foundations: It can never be moved.” But when Galileo observed and calculated, he came to quite a different conclusion. The sun was at the center of the universe and the earth was in constant motion around it. The scripture (and the above-mentioned verse is taken from a book of songs, after all) is poetry, Galileo said, not science. And the heavyweight bout between science and religion commenced. In this corner, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it,” and in the other corner, the challenger, “But that’s not what’s really going on.”

It didn’t go well for the new guy. I quote: “The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.” That pronouncement from Pope Urban VIII would lock Galileo in his house for the rest of his natural life, prevent him from publishing any more books during his lifetime and would eventually lead Galileo to (formally, at least) renounce his strange and threatening belief that the sun was at the center of the universe. Science challenged a religious worldview, and religion refused to do so much as turn its head and listen. And according to reports from the rock band Queen, Galileo was still in hell as late as 1975, when ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was recorded.

On the other hand, Galen. A physician who lived in the second century AD. Though he was a follower of Roman polytheistic religion, according to author Jennifer Michael Hecht, “Galen criticized (the Christians’) dependence on faith and dismissed them as lacking the epistemological evidence for what they claimed.[1]” Galen wanted scientific proof. He looked for it using dissection of animals. Galen was the first physician to propose that an understanding of the human body was necessary for prevention and cure of disease. Galen proved that the brain, not the heart, controlled the body, contrary to widely-held opinion. His approach blended theology and medicine, as he sought to understand the workings of God by investigating nature. Seems like a reasonable approach for a theist physician to take.

But Galen came to some bad medical and scientific conclusions. He was, for example, the first proponent of blood-letting, which turned out not to work so well as he first thought. His certainty that he was right about everything he found compounded the effects of his wrong ideas. To quote one scholar from Brown University: “When he discovered or explained something, further experimentation was not needed… The fact that he made his solutions seem absolute, compounded by his arrogance and reputation, combined to impede the progress of medicine for almost fifteen hundred years (Nuland: 35). From the time of his death up until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries his experimentation was accepted as fact, since it seemed redundant to repeat it. This was especially devastating since he often drew incorrect conclusions… The influence of Galen’s work was so strong that it prevented scientists and physicians from advancing the field of medicine until the Renaissance (www.brown.edu/Departments/Classics/bcj/14-03.html).” People latched onto Galen’s work and refused for some time to move on, in spite of good evidence.

Both science and religion can lend themselves to the fundamentalist mindset. But I think with some creativity, we can avoid the conflict which causes hard-line humanists to mock religion and fundamentalist religionists to consign the afore-mentioned humanists to eternal torture.

In fact, I want today to state my case that science and religion not only don’t need to be in conflict, but actually are better off when they have each other.

I think all of us, mostly religious or mostly scientific, have one big thing in common. We’re all ignorant. Before you hurl the hymnals at me, allow me to explain.

In his 2008 book “The Religious Case Against Belief,” James P. Carse identifies three levels of ignorance. He explains them in an analogy. “Ordinary ignorance is a sleep that does not know itself as sleep… The willfully ignorant are in a state of wakefulness, but one that feigns sleep, intentionally restricting the horizon of their daylight world. (The) learned ignorant are awake, and know they are awake, but also know they will never succeed in altogether dispelling the unwanted drowsiness.[2]” Said differently, for the learned ignorant, and that’s the class Carse wants us to be in, the more we know, the more we realize we have to learn.

And so, Galileo’s problem was that the religious leaders of his day chose to remain willfully ignorant. Pope Urban VIII and the other inquisitors didn’t discuss Galileo’s experiments on the basis of their own merits. They judged them against beliefs. Beliefs.

If we’re left to see religion as a variety of systems of belief, we’re lost already. Science cannot invade this territory. Those who believe that God has called them to rid the world of Western non-believers, or that God has called them to take back Jerusalem from the Muslims, that they must purify Europe and create the master race or rid the world of expecting teenage Moms in abortion doctors’ offices… these believers often are among the willfully ignorant. They often refuse even to consider evidence against their cause. Carse, who knows something about religion, having been the director of the religion program at New York University for 30 years, writes:

“Believers, in short, are terrified by genuine expressions of religion, and respond to them by vigorously ignoring them. They take refuge in agreement, solidarity of membership, and the sense that they belong to something… Thus it was when Urban II saw a loss of fervor in Christendom, he initiated in the year 1095 what was to become several centuries of costly, savage, and ultimately failed crusades against the Saracens. It was far more reassuring for medieval Christians to battle Islam than it was for them to inquire unrestrictedly into the learned and thriving Islamic civilization. In the meantime, of course, it was a way of escaping any inquiry into the great uncertainties of Christianity itself.[3]“

But there’s a difference between believers and the religious. Quoting Carse once more: “Quite simply, being a believer does not in itself make one religious; being religious does not make one a believer.[4]” Too often, belief systems choke out the mystery and quell the fears we have about living and dying and what happens next by creating untestable orthodoxy. God. Heaven. Rapture. Martyrdom. Sacrifice. You must believe or you will be damned. When Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next,” I think he was talking about belief.

But the highest form of religion isn’t knowing what you believe and standing by it no matter the evidence. The highest form of religion, the one which offers the most promise in a globalized, multi-cultural world is a religion which is rooted in wonder at the mystery of our existence. Such religion begins not with arrogant claims of certain knowledge, but with crystal-clear statements of its learned ignorance. We think we have some pretty good guides to life, but we cannot claim to have answered every question. We will simply scour the universe, including ourselves and our religious traditions, for answers.

Here, perhaps religion can ask a favor of science: Namely, that it provide boundaries for our religious search. The religious mind wonders. Why life? Why death and evil? But the best we can do is continue to ask the questions, to find ways to live together under these conditions. When religion begins to answer these questions, belief is born. Again, heaven. Trinity. Miracle healing. And science calls to religion, don’t be so sure. Before you demand belief, remember to check for evidence. What a gift to religion is science, which keeps it accountable and preserves the mystery that gave religion its birth by stopping it short of making objective requirements of belief.

Of course, science has from time to time become too big for its britches as well. Galen is only one example. And religion can also remind science that it isn’t good to claim to know too much too soon. Sometimes it’s best to live in the mystery. To seek and question and test, yes, but to live in the mystery when no answer becomes apparent. And it’s OK to admit that we haven’t discovered the scientific answer to every question.

When a religion of the mysteries and a science which admits its limits combine in a person, in a congregation or a denomination or across religious identities, when we can count ourselves among the learned ignorant, those who know their limits, we can end this silly fight between the scientifically minded and the religiously minded. In fact, I don’t think that’s the argument at all.

In conclusion, I quote Chris Hedges’ book I Don’t Believe in Atheists. “The battle between (the) new atheists and the religious fundamentalists engages two bizarre subsets of American culture. One distorts the scientific theory of evolution, applying it to complex social, economic and political systems it was never designed to explain. The other insists that the six-day story of creation in Genesis is fact and Jesus will descend from the sky to establish the kingdom of God on earth. Neither God nor science, however, will protect us from the destructive forces within human history and human nature. We are not progressing morally as a species. We are not headed toward uplands of sunlight and harmony, toward collective salvation. The technological advances made by human societies have empowered, in equal measure, those dedicated to preserving and protecting life, and those dedicated to violence and industrial slaughter. The battle underway in the United States is not between religion and science. It is a battle between two utopian forms of faith. These antagonists trade absurdity for absurdity. They show that the danger is not religion or science. The danger is the fundamentalist mindset itself.[5]“ 

OPENING READING

From Science and Religion, an address by Albert Einstein to Princeton Seminary in May, 1939.

“For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. According to this interpretation the well-known conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described… Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up.”

CLOSING READING

From “Faith Without Certainty” by UU minister Paul Rasor

“Physics and astronomy often deal with large questions about the nature of the universe and the human place within it. In these and other ways, these pursuits reflect and respond to the human desire for meaning by providing what Richard H. Niebuhr called ‘centers of value.’

In many ways, whether a particular activity or symbol is understood as religious is largely a matter of interpretation or circumstance. Our symbols are not inherently religious; objects and ideas become religious as religious meaning is assigned to them. Moreover, our contemporary world permits a wide range of interpretations. Some people look up and see the heavens where others see astronomical objects (and some see both), and prophets as well as politicians speak of justice (p. xvi).”

[1] Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. San Francisco: Harper One, 2003, p. 126.

[2] Carse, James P. The Religious Case Against Belief. New York: The Pengiun Press, 2008, p. 17.

[3] Ibid., p. 210.

[4] Ibid. p. 2.

[5] Hedges, Chris. I Don’t Believe in Atheists. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 2008, p. 89.

Check out this great Newsweek article. Here’s a quote:

One of the most transformative social movements over our lifetime has been the battle for gay rights, and the key to its great success has been the grass-roots phenomenon of exploding stereotypes by simply saying, “Yes, I am.” Each time the woman at the next desk or the guy down the street lets it be known that he or she is gay, it takes another brick out of the wall of division. Or, as Ellen DeGeneres told John McCain on her show recently, “We are all the same people, all of us.”

This is a great column by Sheila Kennedy. Enjoy.

Same-Sex Reruns                                                                                                       

The California Supreme Court has struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage. And we all know what that means: the forces of self-righteous indignation are gearing up for the mother of summer reruns. Wait for these oldies but goodies:

Judges have no business making such decisions. Um, sorry, but that’s their job. Judges are supposed to decide the cases before them, and some require deciding whether a particular law is consistent with the state or federal constitution. Judges don’t just wake up in the morning and say, gee, I feel like overturning some legislation today.

Judges should not overturn the will of the people. Failed government class, did you? In a constitutional republic, fundamental rights are not subject to majority vote. The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government cannot do even when popular majorities approve. In this case, moreover, that argument is unavailable; the California legislature—the “voice” of the people—passed same-sex marriage legislation not once, but twice, only to have Governor Schwarzenegger veto it both times. (It’s also worth noting that those on the Right who scream most loudly about respecting “the will of the people” didn’t hesitate to ask the courts to overturn the will of the people in Oregon who passed a referendum legalizing assisted suicide, or the will of the people in California who endorsed medical marijuana. Can we spell hypocrite?)

We need to elect Republicans who will put “strict constructionists” on the bench. Well, let’s see. It’s certainly true that contemporary Republicans are determined to put ideologically driven judges on the bench. And they have had some measure of success. But judges who are even minimally qualified are more likely to rule based upon controlling statutes and precedents than on their personal preferences. The California Supreme Court is a case in point: of the seven sitting judges, six were appointed by Republican governors.

And then there’s the old standard: Throughout human history, marriage has always been between one man and one woman. Well, no. In early Israel, a man could have several wives and concubines. (People who’ve actually read the bible, rather than merely thumping it, might recall the story of Jacob, who married two sisters, Leah and Rachel. Or Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines.) In America, in 1848, the Oneida community practiced “complex marriage” where every woman was married to every man in the community, and there was a so-called “Christian polygamy movement,” as late as 1994. Although Mormons have (formally) renounced it, polygamy persists in many parts of the Middle East to this day—among President Bush’s princely pals in Saudi Arabia, for example, and in Senegal, where an estimated 47% of marriages are “plural” or polygamous. There is even some evidence—admittedly disputed—that the medieval Church blessed same-sex unions.

What with Iraq, the recession, climate change, natural disasters, food shortages and gas prices, do we really have to replay these tired arguments about allowing Adam and Steve to file joint tax returns?

Today, the California Supreme Court overturned the state’s ban on same-gender marriage, meaning that same-gender marriage is now legal there. Indiana’s State Supreme Court will someday see a case like this one, and when they do, they have precedent. The march of tolerance is not inevitable, but momentum is building. In a week in which a Ball State student was attacked for his sexuality, we Hoosiers should see two things: we have much work to do, and it can be done.

What are your thoughts?