Editor's Column: Human Rights, Inhuman Wrongs,
September-October, 1999
General Board of Global Ministries/United Methodist Church
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99so/editor.html http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99so/editor.html

This issue of New World Outlook is devoted to as serious a subject as we have ever tackled: the struggle for human rights. Simply a look at the faces of the Kosovo refugees on our cover shows how far this age-old struggle is from being won. In fact, in this end-of-century world of civil wars, occupied homelands, uprooted peoples, deadly landmines, murdered civilians, wrecked houses, burned churches, gun violence, and children forced to live on the streets, we seem to be preoccupied not with human rights but with inhuman wrongs. 
Surely, with so much human suffering to alleviate, so many human hurts to heal, our churches have their work cut out for them well into the next millennium. In fact, people of faith in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere are responding with empathy and activism to the meaner, harsher world encountered by less privileged children of God. Individuals and congregations are feeding, clothing, housing, and resettling refugees around the world through the http://gbgm-umc.org/units/umcor/ United Methodist Committee on Relief. And UMCOR has launched a http://gbgm-umc.org/global/refugees/jneighbor.html%20 Justice for Our Neighbors program to give immigrants in the United States badly needed legal aid. The Methodist-sponsored Street Children's Project in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, has already transformed the lives of a generation of children who are now grown, educated, and able to give back some of the help they received. In Guatemala, Emiliana Aguilar works to safeguard human rights by capturing the stories and struggles of other Mayan women on film. In Puerto Rico, church leaders and members are protesting an off-limits militarized zone and test site on one of their islands, while in the occupied Palestinian territories of the Middle East, United Methodist missionaries are publicizing Israel's practice of land confiscation, home demolition, and a new version of ethnic cleansing. Even as we go to press, a delegation from the Asia Pacific Center in Washington, DC, is roughing it in East Timor to help safeguard the people's right to a free referendum on independence. 
And yet, in our problem-ridden world, where mission challenges await us, why does so much hate continue to fester in the hearts of the fortunate? Where does it come from--the hate that burns Black churches, destroying the social and economic fabric of African American neighborhoods? How did the false idol of White supremacy seduce the 21-year-old man who shot to death a graduate student from Seoul as he was about to enter his Korean United Methodist church for worship? And why do so many people in all our denominations, who know it's not OK to exclude people on the basis of race, sex, creed, color, age, or disability, think it is OK to discriminate on the private and personal basis of sexuality. In our sex-obsessed culture, it's interesting to find in the Oxford English Dictionary that the word sexuality wasn't used in English in its present sense until 1879. And the first use the OED Supplement records for the word homosexuality is dated 1897. These words that didn't even exist in earlier centuries have now become labels that many think tell them everything they need to know. 
The mission that confronts the church in the new century and millennium is to love, not hate; include, not exclude; welcome, not expel. We must be willing to risk all we have and are until all our fellow humans enjoy inalienable rights as a reality. 
—Alma Graham