I am a Catholic who was privileged to grow up in the Church of the 1960s, right here in Hays, Kansas, where my Catholic school teachers repeatedly reminded us of something called "social sin." You rarely hear anything about it anymore among religious types, who focus almost exclusively on personal sins that are usually related in some way to sex. What a sad development.

When I attended Jefferson West in the 1960s, I was repeatedly reminded by my teachers that Hays had a sad history where race was concerned, that a law once forbade Blacks from staying in the town overnight. I later learned that this law had created all sorts of problems whenever Negro League ball teams came to town to play the Hays Larks. Satchel Paige was one of those who endured the discrimination.

When I attended Marian High, books by and about Blacks were continually impressed upon us as works of literature we needed to read if we wanted our education to be truly complete. The titles back then were different from what they would be now, but they included books like "To Sir with Love" and "Black Like Me."

One time the Marian High School administration organized a "Discrimination Week" in which one segment of the school body was designated "Dregs" and one segment was designated "Elites." The Dregs were a minority who had to wear old ugly clothes for the week, enter the school only at certain (inconveniently placed) doors, and drink only at certain (inconveniently placed) fountains. Dregs and Elites could not talk with each other on school premises for the entire week. This kept apart friends who usually were joined at the hip during school hours. At the end of the week, a school assembly was held. The Dregs shared what it had been like for them that week. Then a Black student from Fort Hays State shared what it was like to be a Black student on the streets of town at a time when Black students were even rarer than they are now.

I will never forget the things I heard at that assembly. Some of the most popular girls in school (and the faculty had been careful to select only popular, self-confident students to be Dregs) reported diminishing self-esteem and growing self-doubts as the week wore on. After being mistreated during the school day, they nervously called their friends at night just to hear them say that the day's mistreatment was indeed only an act. The Fort Hays student said that perhaps harder than being looked at with disdain on a city street was being looked right through--as if he were invisible, as if he did not exist at all.

I am proud of my country for judging Barack Obama on the content of his character. My prayer is that someday all Hays people will reach the same level of moral and spiritual development already reached elsewhere in the nation.