Harvard Class of 2016

It's that time of year. Caps and gowns and celebrations with family and friends, awards and diplomas and happy tears as all the hard work pays off.  Dawn Loggins just graduated from Burns High School in North Carolina and is on her way to Harvard. When she visited the campus in April, she just knew. "I just could not picture myself anywhere else, at any other college," she said.

It has not been an easy road for Loggins. She grew up in the midst of abuse and neglect, with cockroaches and no running water and sometimes no electricity either. Her parents had problems with drugs. When she was a very little girl, she didn't understand that other people didn't live that way, wearing the same clothes every day and not bathing for months. The other kids would call her dirty and it made her cry. But Loggins is smart, and she began to picture a better way for herself. "When I was younger," she said, "I was able to look at all the bad choices and make a decision for myself that I was not going to end up like my parents."

Loggins worked as a janitor at her high school, and the staff at the school showed her a lot of support. She showered in the locker rooms, and had her clothes washed there. They encouraged her academic efforts as well. When she was 17, her parents abandoned her and she was homeless. She could have ended up in the system, but she wanted very much to have stability and graduate from Burns. So the people of Lawndale, North Carolina rallied around her and made sure she had what she needed. A home with a family, food and stability. Her supervisor at work traveled with her to Harvard in April so she could see the campus, the trip financed by the generosity of her "village." She turned 18 (legally an adult) during the second semester.

Loggins has a full ride at Harvard; tuition, room and board, and the school has offered to help place her in a job on campus. Since her story has been on CNN, there has been an outpouring of generosity from folks everywhere. She doesn't want the money, because she plans to keep working and she knows she will be fine. But she has set up a non-profit foundation for homeless students where the money can go, and she hopes that her story will shed some light on this very real problem in America.

There are some truly wonderful people in Lawndale, North Carolina, these folks who became a village for this young woman. She had a lot of help along the way, but really it all started when she was just a little girl, when she looked around and decided to picture a different way of life. She is thankful for those who showed her love and support, but let's not be distracted from the most powerful part of the story. For when it's all said and done, Ashley Dawn Loggins made this happen for herself.

Susan

Who Would Jesus Electrocute?

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

Last fall, Herman Cain said we should have an electrical fence at our border, so that anyone trying to cross would be electrocuted and killed. He later said it wasn't a serious plan to deal with immigration problems; it was a joke. Really? Because I don't think it's funny at all. Last week we had Charles Worley, a North Carolina minister, saying that gay people should be confined to an area surrounded by an electric fence. A concentration camp, apparently. It wasn't that long ago that we did have interment camps in our country for the Japanese, during World War II. We still have people alive today who were in concentration camps set up by Adolf Hitler. Unlike Cain, Worley has not said he was joking.

Cain and Worley have more in common than electric fences. They are both Baptists. While there are some very nice people who are Baptists, the collective arrogance of a group of people who believe they have a personal relationship with the son of god boggles the mind. And while many would not be so stupid as to publicly state what Worley said, make no mistake, many would silently agree with him. There is a very real hatred of gays among this group. I know. I used to be a Baptist myself. I was employed as a church secretary and I got a unique view from the inside that the average person in the pew never gets.

Some wonder how people who profess to follow Jesus,  who say they love god, could be so cruel.The problem begins with their view of god. The Baptist religion is a weird mixture of Old and New Testament scripture, with verses taken out of context and completely twisted to serve their own purposes. Their god is not at all like the healer Jesus, the loving Jesus of the gospels. They downplay him and play up the judgemental god of the Old Testament. They believe in a literal hell, an actual place of fire and brimstone, a lake of fire, where unbelievers are tortured forever. Their heavenly father is the ultimate abusive parent, and they emulate him.

If you ask them if god loves gay people, they would say yes, god loves everyone, but he hates sin, and homosexuality is a sin, an abomination, a perversion. They say "love the sinner but hate the sin," but in reality they are all about the hatred. Now not everyone who attends a  Baptist church is like this; it is a collective belief and a very real part of the clergy. Not everyone is a hater, but the official stance is that homosexuality is a sin.

The reason they are arrogant is because they think they know the mind of god. They have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, you see. They have a book that they purport to be the inspired, literal word of god (Worley's church goes so far as to say that only the King James Version from 1611 is inspired.) Not a book about god written by men, but a book breathed by god and penned by men. They are saved. Those who don't believe as they do are lost.

I watched the video of Worley, and he's not at all a good speaker. But some men (women are not permitted to be ministers) in this group are very smooth, very persuasive and very charismatic. It's easy, once you have people believing, to get them to act. While it might be tempting to laugh it off and think that people who make comments like Cain and Worley are just idiots, because to thinking people it sounds so absurd. But some people actually believe the absurdities, so we are just one small step away from the atrocities.

Susan

"Personal Jesus" written by Martin Gore