Lynn Walters is the Director of Programming for Hope for Peace & Justice. Many years ago she, her husband Scott, and their two young kids started attending a mostly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender church because we were doing more peace and justice work than the mainline churches they had been attending. I remember so well the first time I met them. They cared so much that they seemed too good to be true. They weren’t. They were as passionately committed to justice as any two people I have ever met. I have watched in awe as they and their children have gotten involved in so many good and worthy fights, none of which benefited them. They fight for LGBT rights, though they are heterosexual. They fight for living wages for sanitation workers, though both of them earn a living wage. When my kids and I went to march for immigrants’ rights we noticed one other group of very white faces, and we weren’t at all surprised to see the Walters. Amazing.

For several months now, Lynn has been leading our fight against the death penalty. She has organized nearly a dozen events, which is about the average number of people who have attended any of them. Despite a Herculean effort, Lynn hasn’t been able to get people to care enough to get involved. No, she and Scott don’t know anyone on death row, but then their peace and justice work has never been about them.

I believe that John McCain’s greatest hour was not when he was shot down while bombing the people of Vietnam. Rather, when one of the senators from Alabama tried to justify the torture going on at Guantanamo Bay by saying that those being tortured were terrorists, Senator McCain rightly said, “But it isn’t about who THEY are.”

So, too, the work we do to stop state-sponsored killing of prisoners isn’t about who is being executed; it is about who is doing the executing. What kind of people are we, and what kind of people are we becoming? Lynn and Scott Walters understand that. They don’t work tirelessly for justice because it will benefit them; they do it because that is who they are. In the words of John McCain, “My friends, that’s what true heroes do.”

Blessings,

Michael Piazza
President, Hope for Peace & Justice