Editor, Gazette-Journal:

I will try to respond to Dawn Dale’s letter (“Fear destruction from within,” Dec. 11 Readers Write) as directly as possible. Ms. Dale covers a wide range of issues.

Ms. Dale seems to be confusing gender identity (a person’s private sense of their gender) with biological sex (the outward physical characteristics). Whether by nature or by nurture, a person’s gender identity is formed around age 3 or 4. A person does not just suddenly decide to feel male or female. An individual might not reveal until much later in life how they identify due to social stigma. Physical characteristics are of course determined by the combining of either X or Y chromosomes.

The only self-centered attitude I see here is Ms. Dale turning a gender identity social issue into a platform for her personal religious rant. The mother and civil liberty groups are not exploiting anything. They are protecting the right of this individual to fair and equal treatment. There is no agenda to crush religion, divide or weaken America. Ms. Dale claims these groups offer no genuine help, but does not elaborate what would qualify as genuine help.

Ms. Dale brings up damage done to our schools and universities, but does not list anything specific. Is she referring to the removal of school prayer and the attempted indoctrination of our young, vulnerable Americans who will believe anything an adult authority figure tells them, using them as a tool to promote her religion?

Ms. Dale brings up Pvt. Manning and asks how much it has cost taxpayers to pay for his surgery. The latest article I could locate on Pvt. Manning was September 2014 at which time Manning had not undergone any surgery. Unless Ms. Dale has more recent information, taxpayer cost for surgery is zero.

Ms. Dale states that all the answers to our problems are found in the Bible. Please excuse my shortcomings, but I do not recall where exactly in the Bible gender identity is addressed. The Bible is so ambiguous that one can use it to argue for or against most issues. In fact, it has been used to defend slavery, segregation, laws against interracial marriage and women’s rights.

Ms. Dale is correct on one point. “We, the people” allowed all those things to happen and many more divisive issues, many still going on today. We allowed these things, until someone finally took a stand against what they knew was not right. One voice is joined by others who realize they are not alone in wanting to right inequalities. I am sure Ms. Dale enjoys her right to vote, which she would not have if not for brave individuals fighting for it in the early 1900s.

We should fear destruction from within from religious zealots like Ms. Dale. People who would like to force their religious views on everyone and base those views on a 1,600-year-old book. A book that is so ambiguous and difficult to understand with its ancient writing that most Christians cannot comprehend it without having its passages interpreted by their preferred clergy. True courage comes from within, not from a book.

Thomas Hunley
Cobbs Creek, Va.