A Blair County native has been appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Affairs for the next two years.

Missy Peters is one of 28 commissioners who will be on the 2025-27 board, according to a news release from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office.

Peters is gay, and has been married to a woman, Renee, for a decade.

Through her work on the commission, Peters hopes to help make the social environment in Blair County more inclusive, she said.

That would help LGBTQ individuals here feel safer and less fearful of being visible, she said.

She is aiming for “acceptance and to do away with ignorance,” she said.

Peters considers herself lucky in her experiences here, having not felt “much, if any” discrimination, despite “being in the wrong color of a county,” she said, referring to Blair’s Republican majority.

She qualified that statement, however, with respect to her faith experience: her church, an independent one, has been accepting of her — but not affirming, she said.

For example, leadership positions in her congregation are closed to her, she said.

She moved to her current church from the United Methodists, after her UM congregation voted not to go along with UM leadership’s decision to eliminate its official condemnation of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ clergy and its decision to affirm LGBTQ individuals in their life choices, she said.

That lack of affirmation in her experience of organized religion makes her sad, she said.

“(But) I’m not an angry person,” Peters said.

Her faith journey as an individual will determine whether she ultimately gets to heaven, “not someone sitting at the head of the church,” she added.

But, as an LGBTQ person, she has been feeling vulnerable lately, based on the actions and attitudes of the Trump administration.

She’s terrified that the president might try through executive order to do away with the federal requirement that same-sex marriages be honored, she said.

There are different levels to that fear: the limitations it would put on insurance arrangements and signoffs for hospital care; and the “emotional part,” she said.

“I like the word ‘wife,'” she said. “I like the idea of marriage,” and she doesn’t want to go back to the days of “civil unions.”

Her being married to a woman should not offend the larger society, as it creates no problems for people in heterosexual marriages, she said.

She’s also become uneasy about the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI, not because of a wish that certain categories of people might get an advantage in seeking jobs, she said.

She deserves no such advantage, she said.

But those attacks have caused the elimination of positions in institutions like universities that previously provided help for people whose membership in minority groups confers clear disadvantages for them, she said.

She was considered for the appointment to the commission because as facilitator of the Blair County Inclusion Alliance, she came into contact with the commission’s executive director, Ashleigh Strange, who came to last year’s Pride march in Blair County, she said.

The commission was established by Shapiro’s executive order.

It has its roots in the PA Council for Sexual Minorities, established by then-Gov. Milton Shapp in 1975, according to the release.

During the last two years, the commission has worked on “addressing health inequities among LGBTQ Pennsylvanians,” the news release stated.

It has also worked with state police and the state Office of Homeland Security to hold Pride Safety Webinars, the release stated.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.