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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