‘The Help’: How Did It Ever Happen?

by Bob Henderson Chair, Kay County, OK Democrats

I expect most of you who go to movies have seen “The Help” by now. What a powerful emotional experience and great history lesson, especially for those too young to even remember segregation.

I grew up in Blackwell, a town where African Americans were not permitted, by custom, to buy property. That was an extreme form of segregation, but I didn’t know it.

As a youth, I was told, often, that there used to be signs at the city limits, “n—-r, don’t let the sun go down on you.” No one who told this to me gave me any idea whether it was a good or a bad thing. But they always seemed to be telling me a proud thing about our town. So until I was in college, I just accepted it, without any serious question. After all, I knew no African Americans.

The history of our nation has been a zigzagging march toward overcoming such ignorance, and extending the values of equality, expressed in our founding documents, to more and more Americans. Something we once feared, we now embrace.

Today’s civil rights issues concern the LGBT community, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons. This revolution is still in progress.

Although it’s difficult to understand today, some Southern churches used the Bible to defend slavery, to defend segregation, to defend laws forbidding persons of different races to marry, and to impose second-class status on women. All those issues are now long-resolved, and it seems strange they ever could have frightened and divided us.

Many of these same churches now quote the Bible in explaining their determined opposition to allowing gay Americans the same rights as other Americans, principally, the right to marry the person they love and start a family, if that is their wish.

I would guess that, for members of these churches, it is as difficult to question what they have always believed as it was for me to question that horrible sign.

When you hear something stated as a fact about gay Americans, for example that children raised by two parents of the same sex are more likely to develop drug problems and end up in prison, do you question it? Until we are exposed to facts concerning something we know little about, it is just too easy to accept information that panders to our fears.

The truth is studies show that children raised by two parents of the same sex fare just as well later in life as children raised by a mother and a father.

That’s why I believe this issue should be discussed openly, rather than just whispered about. Those who think they oppose same-sex marriages need access to more than one opinion, and to factual information that will allow them to reach their own conclusions.

Does it puzzle you, as it does me, that people most resistant to granting gay Americans the right to marry and form families are the same people who claim that what they honor most are “family values”?

Gay Americans who choose to have families and place them at the center of their lives embrace family values in the very same way traditional families do. They want the same wonderful, healthy things for their children.

I have always been puzzled that the “family values” crowd refuse to welcome gay couples, and to respect their families, so much like their own. Their values are exactly the same.

Until we look at change, we usually fear it. It used to be against the law in some states to engage in any activity to bring the black and white races together.

Now we wonder why we ever believed such nonsense, and this is so much better.