Tolerance and respect

When a gunman killed and wounded a bunch of people at Club Q , a gay-friendly nightclub in Colorado Springs, Joshua Thurman, one of the attendees, said amid tears, “We were just enjoying ourselves. We weren’t out harming anyone. We were in our space, our community, our home, enjoying ourselves like everybody else does.”

These poignant words should mean something to Arkansans. We Arkansans have long lamented that our state is 49th in everything. We elected our officials to address our many problems and do good things for everyone. We didn’t elect them to bog all of us down in their endless culture wars. Yet they’re eternally fixed on stigmatizing and punishing many good, innocent citizens whose only crime is that they are different. They have no leftover energy to address our state’s real problems.

No wonder we’re 49th! The No. 1 priority at the Capitol seems to be to station police in every bedroom, doctor’s office, schoolroom, and library in our state. All of this mean-spiritedness only encourages the kind of violence we saw in Colorado Springs.

All of us are entitled to our own opinions and our own safe spaces where we can enjoy ourselves “like everybody else does.” Mutual tolerance and respect is our only path to a healthy and prosperous future for all of us. That’s not what’s being modeled by our state leaders.

SANDY WYLIE

Bella Vista