Concerns about intolerance, prejudice and deportation were at the forefront of a panel discussion titled “Faith Over Fear” held last Friday at Manheim Township’s Grace United Church of Christ.

The panel included Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray; Lancaster Police Chief Keith Sadler; Christine Baer, congregational resource developer Church World Services; Shayna Watson, religious affairs chair at the NAACP, Lancaster Branch; Pam Craddock, a nurse midwife in private practice and Julie Zaengle, an attorney who handles LGBT cases.

The level of concern was clear in terms of the size of the audience — roughly 100 people attended the meeting — and by the worries expressed by people.

A gay woman in the audience brought a basket of safety pins and tearfully asked everybody to pin them on their coats to show solidarity with the LGBT community.

“I wake up every day afraid because I don’t know who I can trust,” she said. “I don’t know when I’m around someone who wants to hurt me.”

The Rev. Katie Cort, Grace’s pastor, asked the panel “What fears have you heard, and what’s Lancaster doing about them?”

Hate crime concerns

Watson said African Americans are worried about an increase in hate crimes.

“I’ve heard of black people being called monkeys and told to go back to Africa,” Watson said. “I’ve heard of attempts to register every Muslim. Are they legitimate? No one really knows…. Rage can be blinding.”

Baer, who works with refugees, said many immigrants and refugees worry that their family members who hope to follow them may not be allowed in. They also fear President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals plan will be repealed. That is an immigration policy that allows certain undocumented immigrants who entered as minors to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit.

“We need to acknowledge the fears,” Baer said of her faith-based organization. “We’re waiting to see what will happen. We may have to alter our range of services, but we’re still going to be here.”

Craddock worries that the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, will be overturned and most of all that Planned Parenthood will be defunded, even though only 3 percent of its budget is spent on abortions. She also worries about sexual harassment not being taken seriously in light of President-elect Donald Trump’s comment that a woman being harassed in the work place should find another job.



Greater intolerance

“A lot of people will say, ‘If Trump can do it, I can do it,’ ” Craddock said.

Gray concurred, noting that there is a license for intolerance in the message, “Make American Great Again.”

“It made it acceptable to be intolerant,” Gray said, adding that tolerance is just another word for politeness.

Zaengle said that many of Obama’s executive orders could be overturned.

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“There are a lot of fears that a lot that’s been done in the past four years could be taken away,” she said.

Gray also expressed concerns about the proposed repeal of Obamacare. He recounted how his self-employed daughter underwent chemotherapy for cancer when she was pregnant. Today she and her child are healthy, but without the Affordable Care Act, he said, she would be unable to afford health insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

Gray sees Roe v. Wade as very vulnerable because Trump will be appointing justices to the Supreme Court.

“All it will take is five votes,” he said. “That could go.”

To counter people’s fears, Gray urged polite, nonjudgmental one-on-one conversations with people who voted for Trump.

“I think a lot of people who voted for Trump didn’t know what they did,” he said. “We need to talk to people. We’re losing the middle class. They’re making less money now than 10-15 years ago.”

A woman in the audience seconded Gray’s recommendation to talk one-on-one.

“We can’t forget the power of one,” she said. “If we talk with love, not anger, you’ll be surprised how many people will be at your side.”

Gray recommended a reading list that includes Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” and J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“They’re about strangers in their own land,” Gray said. “We have to begin to talk to each other and understand each other, to find what common ground we have and to work together.”

Gray pointed out that the reason William Penn founded Pennsylvania was for religious freedom.

He noted that Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the country reminded him of the body of the drowned 3-year-old Kurdish boy that washed up on a beach in Turkey after he fell from a boat vastly over-packed with desperate Syrian refugees.

Sadler said that despite the very valid concerns raised by people, he remains an optimist. He said America is not a melting pot, where everyone becomes the same, but a mosaic, where people can keep their identity. Lancaster, he said, is a very diverse community.

“I have faith in the rights we do have,” he said.

His big disappointment is that younger people have taken many of the rights or social norms they enjoy for granted and did not vote inthe election.

“My fear about LGBT rights,” he said, “is that the population under 40 doesn’t concern itself with these things. When younger folks decide they need to vote, things will get better.”