By LEE HOWELL
Contributing Writer

In the beginning — or “When God began to create,” if you prefer that translation of the Holy Scriptures (for the Bible was written in Hebrew and God did not speak “the King's English”) — God created man “in his own image.”

Those same sacred words tell us that God created male and female and gave them “dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

It has always stood out in my mind that the Bible does not say God created black men and white men, black women and white women, but just that “in the image of God, male and female he created them.”

Thus, my commitment to equal rights for all men and women has always been primarily based upon my firm belief that God is the Creator of us all.

There may be many well-meaning Christians reading this who will say that if God meant for us all to be equal, he would not have created so many different species, but we are not discussing unthinking animals but human beings with the power to think, to reason, to build, and to care.

Consequently, to my way of thinking, once this principle is firmly entrenched in someone's value system, there can be no question about every person's equal right to choose where he or she wants to live, work, eat, sleep, or whatever.

The so-called civil rights for which so many men and women of good will marched to win in the 1950s and 1960s are, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “self-evident.”

Equal opportunity is the key “unalienable right” for which our the revolutionaries who founded this nation pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

Admittedly, this nation has not always lived up to the lofty commitments we preach.

Jefferson, for instance, owned slaves and did not even free them upon his deathbed (as did several of our Founding Fathers).

And, even though our land was bitterly scarred by a war between the states in order to finally end that evil, segregation was the still the law of the land until just three decades ago or so ago and there are still some de facto pockets of segregation still existing in all parts of the country.

As a child of the 1960s, my maturing process took place during that revolution for human freedom which shook the foundations of this nation.

My generation was intimately involved in the changing of the system which kept one-third of the nation's people in bondage — even though the chains were made of misguided legislation, not steel.

Finally, the laws were changed and as time passed those changes became the norm in our society.

We all thought we had won that struggle — no matter how begrudged by some was our victory.

But, then, just when we become comfortable and complacent in our idealism, we are shaken back to reality by some incident which proves again that hatred and evil are still with us.

Whether it be some dramatic situation in which an individual is beaten by officials acting a little too zealously in pursuit of their duties — or some vicious murder by this hate-mongering group or that — there always seems to be another “incident” which requires once again that we re-assess our victories and prepare to take a stand again for what is right.

We can march in some mass demonstration, we can support the groups in which we believe from afar with our voices and our money, or we can simply live our lives so that no one ever has to wonder where we stand, or what we believe, or why.

It is easy to talk about brotherhood: Anyone can utter the words.

But, the hard part — and what we must do — is to live them.

[Lee N. Howell is an award-winning writer who has been observing politics and society in the Southern Crescent, the state, and nation for the past 25 years.]

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