Few teenagers at Wando High School want to be gay. It's also likely most students at our school would prefer to be the same color, have the same religion, be popular, slim and have the perfect sense of current style. To be a teenager in America is to want to fit in, to be accepted, to be part of the group.

We, the students of Wando High School now and then, have never fit together as well or as happily as we would like. We are black and white. We are rich and poor. Some of us are beautiful and slim. Others of us struggle with weight and appearance.

There are those among us who labor against disability, sickness and the growing weaknesses of age. Some struggle with bad choices. Others are masters of their own fates. We are divided by religious belief, social status, affectional orientation, political affiliation and opinions about the current football coach. We are they who walked through the octagonal halls of old Wando by the hundreds and those thousands who fill the great corridors of new Wando today.

We are the editor of this newspaper (a cheerleader in her time), my brothers, my nephew, my son and myself, class of 1978.

We are divided by many, many things. Despite that, we are tribe. We are Warriors.

On March 23 from 3:30 - 4 p.m. protestors from the Westboro Baptist Church will appear outside Wando High School to promote their message that God hates gay people and America is doomed by depravity. They are part of the spreading disease of hatred, fear and prejudice which is infecting our republic at a time when love, acceptance and unity are required. Westboro is wrong about Wando, America and Jesus.

Charleston County School District and local law enforcement will provide a large, coordinated security detail to protect everyone at the school, including the demonstrators and those appearing to support diversity and acceptance. All demonstration activity will be excluded from school property and is expected to take place on the public right of way along Carolina Blvd. It is my hope local law enforcement will follow the Chicago practice of assigning each group their own side of the road.

I am a graying member of the tribe with a body now too big and broken to be beautiful, an American in a time of conflict and an imperfect follower of Jesus of Nazareth in an age of sin. Despite what the students of Wando High school have been told and sold, it is God's design that there be differences among us. It is his plan that we make different choices, even sinful ones, so that we posses freedom to choose to be good, to be just and to show mercy and kindness. That is the wonderful and terrible thing which makes us like God and his angels. Thus are we holy and human.

Next week that choice is forced upon us. Not merely. in the face of hatred, but in all things must we be contributing citizens, be fair and forgive. We must do that in class with the peer who is different. We must be that as we work and shape the form of our government together. We must be the blessed peacemakers called for in the sermon on the mount. That is what Warriors must fight for next week. If our tribe is together in that effort, all which divides us matters less. The world we share, for which our God made us, will better reflect his will.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'On. He will update that day http://twitter.com/wjhamilton29464 on twitter and suggests #mtpsc as the hashtag.)