Views from readers: Medal of Honor + skate park + LGBTQ stories

Nice reporting

The Sun Herald provided a factual, fair, and respectful report on two front-page stories: one about Lynn Koval and the other about Blair Bradley. The reporters, Justin Mitchell, Margaret Baker, and Jesse Lieberman, were absent of obvious bias in their storytelling.

My heart went out to Ms. Koval and her wife as they face yet another challenge in a life already filled with a myriad of social barriers to their existence. I much appreciated learning the history of “Just Us” and the safe space it provides for LGBTQ+ individuals to just be. Mitchell and Baker told their story without hyperbole and with compassion.

Lieberman detailed Rev. Bradley’s demand to ban displays of books depicting homosexual and transgender individuals.

As an African-American woman who grew up in the 1950s, seeing myself represented in books would have been life giving, particularly in the context of a Christian church that too often utilized scripture to justify slavery, the dis-empowerment of women and dehumanization of people of color.

As I read the reporting on Rev. Blair’s demand that children were not to learn about the many differing ways that human beings manifest, the church again finds itself stuck in culturally bound unscientific understandings of what it means to be fully human.

We must as a nation move beyond long-held, culturally entangled religious understandings of who is to be valued as fully human through vigorous research of the various cultural contexts that influenced differing biblical iterations. At least can we be respectful of differing viewpoints, allowing our children to learn the rich diversity in divine creativity?

Rev. Alice M. Graham, PhD

Retired Executive Director, Back Bay Mission

Founder, Turning Points From the Soul

Medal of Honor

Recently, at a political gathering, former President Trump told the audience he wanted to give himself the Congressional Medal of Honor. He said: “I always want that. But they would not let me do it.”

“They” had good reason. The Congressional Medal of Honor is the highest honor granted for military service, reserved most often for heroism in wars. Generals are required to salute Medal of Honor recipients.

The closest Mr. Trump got to war was that he dodged the military draft for the Vietnam War by having his family doctor state that he had a heel spur. It is impossible to call that heroic military service.

But, as so often demonstrated, Mr. Trump never acknowledges simple facts when he is the subject.

Nor does he have any concept of the dishonor he visits on true war heroes, many of whom suffer grievous wounds, by his purely self-centered, outlandish statement.

Charles A. Boggs

Long Beach

Bring it back

What will it take to get the Harrison County supervisors to open the hockey rink again?

At it’s peak, it hosted hundreds of kids and adults on tournament weekends. Now that hockey is back in South Mississippi, we have a prime opportunity to reopen the park and engage a new generation of hockey fans.

We’ve wasted time and money trying to shoehorn other businesses into a hockey rink.

It’s time to restore it to its former glory. Reopen the rink, and bring hockey to the next generation of fans.

Jesse Murphy

Biloxi

Joe Biden

Why would anyone try to defend the Biden administration at this point?

The destruction of America is obvious to anyone who drives or shops for groceries, and a recent Sound Off was dead on, people are mad.

Could that have something to do with all the violence going on?

Malcolm McBee

Gautier

Hospital care

We recently had a large hospital in New Orleans take over our small county hospital in Bay St. Louis.

You will find if Singing River is bought, that you can’t call your doctor. All calls are routed to some unknown person in New Orleans.

When you do finally get an appointment, the doctor seems more interested in his assessment on his computer and hardly even looks at the patient. No build up of trust. No personal interaction.

Love your county hospital. Don’t use it for care than can be done in a doctor’s office. Don’t abuse what you have.

Rosalie W. Kergosien

Bay St. Louis