At a recent lunch with United Methodist colleagues, I asked, “Why has LGBTQ inclusion been such a lightning rod?” The answer came quickly.
Ruminating on that answer, I remembered a class I took on the Civil War at Salt Lake City Public Library. The white man sitting next to me said authoritatively, “The Civil War was not about slavery,” and then he spoke of the underlying issues of states’ rights, economics and political control.
However correct or incorrect that pronouncement (many respected historians do list slavery as a primary cause), the emancipation of enslaved humans was the lightning rod of its time that drew John Brown and his followers to Harper’s Ferry.