Wahpeton, N.D. is about an hour long drive from Fargo, through vast, empty farmland that’s brown and yellow this time of year. It will look very different soon.  Farmers are already out on their tractors preparing for the planting season.

Another change might be coming too. This summer, the Supreme Court will take up the question of same-sex marriage; which is still banned in North Dakota and twelve other states. It’s an issue that often becomes polarized in national politics. But in this small hub of rural America, gay rights aren’t something people particularly like to talk about.

There was an incident here 16 years ago, though, that forced a number of people in the community to choose a side. At Evergreen United Methodist Church, the pastor refused to baptize a baby because he felt that the child  adopted by a lesbian couple could not be given a Christian home.

Kim Mann was a member of that church at the time. Her hands and voice quiver as she prepares to talk about it. She says she remembers the gay couple leaving quietly.

“I really don’t think it was that out in the open,” Mann says. “Because nobody backed them up, or went to bat for them. And you know, we would have left the church at that time … others, some people did. We would have left then too but I had three kids who never said, ‘Do we have to go to church?’ “

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/13/399236411/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-gay-marriage

People in society treat gay and lesbian people as some type of alien of foreign animals. Why cant people accept other people for who they are? We all come from different backgrounds and have different stories about our lives.  A core democratic value is our liberty and we would not be a nation without compromise.   No one is asking American citizens to compromise their own private morality when it comes to marriage.  Who is being harmed by gay marriage?  In the story above it seems hypocritical to deny baptism when that is the sacrament that supposedly saves believers from their own inherent “sinfulness”.  Did Jesus come to exclude others?  I don’t think so.

I personally had a friend who got beaten up by a group of guys because he was gay. I just don’t get why people have this picture on how life is supposed to be because not everyone is perfect. The core democratic values that were present in this article are authority, liberty, and life.