When I left the post office on Main Street in Farmington recently, I was met by a woman who wanted to share with me “the truth” – the Founding Fathers left gays out of the U.S. Constitution on purpose. “They knew a marriage between two people of the same sex is wrong.” I requested some documentation. “I just know they knew that,” the woman told me.

I thought I’d time-traveled back to Nazi Germany, where homosexuals were sent to the gas chamber after going through a series of experiments because Hitler “knew” what was right.

Then the woman showed me her sign: “Obama: Socialist Marxist?” Again, I time-traveled back to the early ’50s and McCarthyism. “It’s only a question, only words,” she said. With another passerby, she questioned whether Obama was a Muslim.

I was reminded of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” written when all the white clergy of that city had withdrawn their support for a man who believed that all people are one.

That all people are one is what I thought it meant to stand by the American flag. Might we even all be one in the world? We are only here for the blink of an eye. Why waste precious minutes to exclude, condemn, harm? Why not use those minutes to include, to respect and care for all the colors, shapes, styles we come in?

Elizabeth Cooke, Phillips