I made the following 5-minute public comment at my local Hanover County (VA) Board of Supervisors’ meeting on Wednesday, January 12, 2022. I wanted to share it here in honor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday this year. Here’s a video of me delivering this public comment (I’m at the 57:15 min mark.) Context: The Board of Supervisors appoints school board members in my county. The school board voted in November to not follow a state law that requires them to adopt inclusive policies for transgender school children. I have a transgender son who attends Hanover County Public Schools. 

I want to speak regarding the board’s upcoming school board appointments and for the general social environment of our Hanover County community.

With the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday coming up, I thought it might be a good time to share with you something new I learned about Martin Luther King just 3 years ago from Rev. Janie Walker. She gave the MLK day keynote address at Randolph Macon College that year.

She said that King believed in the concept of a “beloved community,” that to himself he wasn’t primarily a civil rights activist, but he became known as a civil rights activist as a byproduct of his belief in the “beloved community.” That’s how he identified himself centrally, as a Christian believer in the beloved community vision.

Did you all know this? I didn’t know this. Learning it helped me to frame my own vision for the type of community I want to live in.

The Beloved Community is a community where every single member of the community is valued for who they are. That each person has unique gifts to give their community and in a beloved community they are free to contribute their gifts to serve their community. Barriers are removed. A Beloved community is one in which everyone is cared for, absent of poverty, hunger, and hate.

Can you imagine living in such a place? Where the work of managing our community is shared more evenly, where the best of citizens is on full display? King gloried in this vision and he believed it was possible, if only we could remove the barriers that keep people from giving the best of themselves to their communities. That’s how he arrived as his activism.

I want to linger here for a moment. ALL people are valuable. No exceptions. NONE. Not for skin color, income level, religion, education level, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities —- gender identity. EVERY SINGLE LAST ONE of us is valuable exactly as we are. We don’t need to act more like someone else, we simply need to be allowed to be the best versions of ourselves. Be free to develop our gifts, and be free to give our gifts. In the context of Christianity, this is the idea of Devine Spark, that there’s a piece of the divine in every one of us. To cast aside any of us is to cast aside the divine.

Sometimes I feel undervalued because I am a woman, put in my place, expected to give free labor. Some of you might know what that’s like.

I think there’s a little part of many of us that feels undervalued to some level. Who among us hasn’t had the experience of feeling like the outsider? Underestimated, limited, kept down? We live in a greater society that is structured around social hierarchies, so chances are many of you have felt this feeling too.  Maybe you’re not rich enough, or philanthropic enough, or you or your kids didn’t go to a good enough college. Imagine being even more socially disadvantaged in Hanover, of being in poverty, disabled, being Brown or Black — being LGBT.  Or any combination of these.

What brings me here today is that I am begging Hanover to provide policies, appointments, and priorities that allow each citizen of Hanover to feel valued and be allowed to develop and give their gifts to our community. I beg you to see each one of us as a valuable contributor. See ALL of us as counting as humans.

What would you do differently if you knew that my child would one day be able to change the world for the better, if only you would support policies that nurture and support him? Do that.