Another View
I wanted to be an altar boy in the strongest possible way when I was in the fifth grade in 1956. I wanted to wear the black cassock and white surplice. I wanted to be part of the mass. And I did it in 29 Palms, California. I was thrilled the first time the priest said the opening lines, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” and I replied, “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” Which when translated means, “I will go to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth.”, and not only did the mass give joy to my youth, but so did the gospels. And even today when I see the acronym DEI, I think of those lines and how the mass and the gospels infused my response to the civil rights movements for blacks, women, and gays.
I honored the good samaritan and the woman at the well. I believed in the new law that said love one another, and the golden rule that said, do to others what you would have them do to you. So, I cringed when people spit on a little girl in Arkansas who only wanted to go to school, and I was offended when dogs and firehoses met marchers at the Edmund Pettus bridge, and I cried when they dug up the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. And I was thrilled when Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, and a classmate of my aunt, signed the 1964 Civil Rights legislation and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Most of all, I understood why, as did Lyndon, how a people who had come here as slaves and then suffered 100 years of Jim Crow laws, might need a helping hand and a little protection on their way to equality, and it was the same for women and gays, minorities oppressed in different ways, but still oppressed. And now I’m puzzled how that helping hand can be called illegal and immoral discrimination. I could see making an argument that we’ve reached equality, that there are plenty of laws protecting people's rights, and that adding more programs is wasteful. But to call efforts promoting diversity, equity and inclusion immoral seems a stretch. The little boy in me who remembers the God who gave joy to his youth, thinks He might have a different opinion.