Something Rotten in Denmark
In West Virginia, we’ve learned the hard way that Shakespeare was right: There is, indeed, something very rotten in Denmark.
At Climate Week events in New York City last month, Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen appeared alongside the CEO of the Danish manufacturing company Rockwool to tout the country’s commitment to the green economy. However, the glitzy Manhattan gathering is juxtaposed against rising tensions in rural West Virginia where my neighbors and I are battling the very same Danish manufacturer to preserve our air quality and way of life.
In 2017, Rockwool announced that it would build an insulation factory in Jefferson County, West Virginia, a pastoral community of 55,000 residents in the northern Shenandoah Valley with an economy largely based on agriculture, tourism, and a beneficial proximity to the DC-Baltimore region. As details of the Rockwool project emerged, opposition to the factory has boiled over with more than 12,000 residents signing an online petition in a matter of weeks and hundreds of citizens appearing at local hearings to express their disapproval. Hand-painted anti-Rockwool signs have cropped up in farm fields and front yards, dotting the countryside as a silent but powerful symbol of the community’s fierce objections and deepening anxieties. …
Over the past several years, I have had numerous conversations with well-intentioned pastors and Christian friends who have told me that while they cannot affirm same-sex relationships, they want to know how to better show love to the LGBT community. As a Christian and a gay man, these are not easy conversations for me. I pray for full acceptance in the Church but also recognize that progress is incremental. I firmly believe that love and compassion can still exist in the midst of theological disagreement.
And then tragedy struck. Like all of us, I woke up Sunday morning to the horrifying news that 49 people were killed during an attack on a gay club in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The news was too horrible to comprehend, so many young lives cut short in an instant. The fact that a gay club had been targeted seemed anything but incidental. In addition to intense sadness, I suddenly felt more vulnerable and fearful as an LGBT person. …
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