I saw an article in the Texarkana Gazette

Context
I go to Quaker meeting in Texarkana, even though I live in Shreveport. Today someone brought a copy of the Texarkana Gazette to meeting, and it had an article about people protesting a home for recovering drug addicts being planned in their neighborhood. This is a quote from the article: “'I don’t know of anybody who really gets off drugs and they come with all that baggage and we don’t want that around our children,' said Sheila Oates, who lives on Stipp Lane not too far from the location."

Commentary
NIMBY-type protests strike me as the worst possible kind of hypocrisy, because the people involved almost always agree that the activity in question is necessary or even desirable, but they don’t want to have to live near it. They’re not anti-nuclear power; they’re pro-making someone else live with the consequences. I suppose I should be happy that some of the protesters in this case are at least being consistent enough to say they don't see any point in attempting to rehabilitate drug users anywhere.

I'm not happy, though. In fact, I find this case particularly irksome, because of something the members of my meeting keep hammering into my head: “everyone around here is a Christian.” The members of my meeting who are not Christian sometimes feel ostracized and persecuted because they don’t believe “correctly.” Or they just don’t bother to tell people and save themselves the grief. So we have a whole city full of Christians which includes at least one neighborhood where they don’t want to have to be around drug addicts. Interesting.

Now, don’t get me wrong. My Lutheran upbringing makes me a strong believer in “saved by grace through faith alone.” There is no action one can take (or not take) to ensure one’s salvation except believing in the Gospel. But I always hope for myself and my brothers and sisters in Christ that after we’ve been saved we will be of some benefit to the rest of the world. Rejecting people at the very moment when they’re trying to turn their lives around doesn’t seem beneficial to anyone, including the Christian children you’re trying to raise.

I think this is a hazard to being a Christian in the South. When being a Christian is the norm, then “normal” behavior, like shielding your children from people with problems, becomes equated with Christian behavior, so it doesn’t need to be examined or questioned. That’s one of the reasons I’m strongly in favor of the separation of church and state. Once we have a “Christian” government, then everything it does will be, by definition, Christian. Yeah, right.

What did you see today?