“People like you should be shot and killed!” That’s what was shouted at Don Dent and Terry Tebedo when they visited Northwest Bible Church in Dallas in 1987. They vowed never to go back. Terry died of AIDS the following year.
Don has since become a serious Christian and has come to know a younger generation of Christians who are showing him God’s grace as it was not shown before. He’s learning from them and they’re learning from him.
Recently, one of his new friends from Dallas Theological Seminary invited him to a service at Northwest church. Don told him of the incident of 22 years ago. His friend asked him to come in spite of that terrible experience and Don did. His friend introduced him to the pastor, Neil Tomba, and told him what Don had endured. Tomba, who joined the church in 1996 and became senior pastor in 2001, apologized for the hostility of those earlier years. Tomba revised his morning’s sermon, told the congregation what had happened and asked that they apologize and that all kneel in a prayer of repentance.
Don was moved to tears, as was the pastor and the congregation. Don says the church’s response has “brought tears to the eyes of all the gay men I’ve mentioned it to. The Dallas gay community has been so negatively impacted by Christians. Neil’s action is a huge step toward a healing process.”
“Where is My Son Welcome?”, a commentary in The Banner, the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church, was written by a CRC pastor and father of a gay son. Mike Veenema writes: “Our son knew he was gay for 10 years without telling anyone. How he must have struggled, wondering if his parents would still accept him if he came out. As I remember the few times he asked me for my personal thoughts on people who were gay, it breaks my heart to think that behind the questions was a growing knowledge about his own orientation.” His son attended a Christian college and was ostracized by fellow students. Says Veenema: “The first setting in which our son was accepted as a gay young man was his ‘secular’ medical school. The acceptance was immediate. What a sad contrast to his experience in the Christian community.”
Angry antigay letters were sent to The Banner in response to Veenema’s testimony.
But another CRC pastor wrote in support. He spoke of his own gay son’s bitter experience of exclusion from a CRC congregation and of his vowing: “I will never set foot in the CRC again.” His son later met his life partner and they were united in a civil ceremony that their parents attended.
This pastor tells of his church class’s reading Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace? Yancey writes of his own support for a gay Christian friend who was ostracized for coming out. Yancey mentions Jerry Falwell’s one-time associate, Ed Dobson, and his caringly reaching out to the gay community. A gay person told Dobson: We “know that you do not agree with us, but you still show the love of Jesus and we are drawn to that.” Dobson told Yancey: “If I die and someone stands up at my funeral and says nothing but ‘Ed Dobson loved homosexuals,’ I would feel proud.”
On The 700 Club, a mother of a gay son asked for Pat Robertson’s help in “handl[ing] the ongoing challenges [of] staying true to our faith and following the commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’? Robertson reply: “First of all, he’s not your neighbor. He’s your son.” He discounts standard etiology on homosexuality and blames “a coach or a guidance counselor or some other male figure who has abused them”. He tells her she must tell her son that “it’s called an abomination before God, so I’ve got to tell you the truth because I love you.’ That’s what I think. All right, what else?”, he asks his co-host, wanting to rush on. She doesn’t and he adds: “Well, I mean, if somebody’s on their way to hell, they’ll – I mean, you’ve got to love them to rescue them.” This was aired on June 9.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney first voiced his support for marriage equality during a Vice-Presidential debate in Danville, Kentucky in 2000. Speaking on June 1, 2009, at the National Press Club, Cheney reaffirmed his endorsement: “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish.” He and his wife have supported their daughter’s lesbian relationship for many years. He’s long been at odds with his party’s platform on this. His endorsement of gay marriage is at odds as well with President Obama’s view that marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples.
James Duggan of QueerTimes Weekly says he disagrees with Cheney “on perhaps every political issue” but he hails Cheney’s continuing advocacy of same-sex marriage rights, calling it “cannon fodder in our fight for equality”. But other LGBT activists’ aversion to Cheney gets in their way. The Gay and Lesbian Leadership SmartBrief website reports that over 72 percent of its viewers refuse to take Cheney at his word on this.
Conservative Ted Olson and liberal David Boies, two of America’s foremost Constitutional lawyers, are working together on behalf of a lawsuit for same-sex marriage rights. In announcing their effort, Olson spoke of the many gay colleagues, friends and family members in everyone’s circles. He said: “If you look into the eyes and hearts of people who are gay and talk to them about this issue, that reinforces in the most powerful way possible the fact that these individuals deserve to be treated equally like the rest of us and not be denied the fundamental rights of our Constitution”.
Bill O’Reilly favors marriage for gay couples. Explaining his view in June, he wrote that, as a libertarian, he wants “all Americans to be able to pursue happiness equally.”
“All you accomplish is you divide up the community and really alienate a lot of people from the church and from the gospel.” This is Assemblies of God pastor Joe Fruiten’s response to his fellow Washington state Christians who want to mount a referendum to stop a gay partnership law. He adds: And “you’re not really going to win.”
Among Americans who attend church each week, the Gallup Poll finds that 60 percent “favor allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military.” This is 11 percentage points higher than 2004 figures. Among all Americans, 69 percent favor such inclusion. This is up by 6 percentage points since 2004. Among Americans between 18-29 years of age, 78 percent favor inclusion. This is up by 9 percentage points since 2004.
Former New York Democratic congressman Floyd Flake preaches against same-sex marriage. In April, in his role as senior pastor of the 20,000-member Greater Allen African American Methodist Cathedral, he thundered: “Ain’t nothing perfect about laying down and signing a license with somebody who got the same body parts you got.” The New York Times reported that the congregation cheered the attack while the organist punctuated Flake’s words with Ray Charles’ hit, “I’ve Got a Woman”.
Black clergy rallied against gay marriage in Washington, D.C. in April. Maryland Bishop Harry Jackson and D.C.’s ex-mayor, Marion Barry, led some 150 protesters in chanting, “No to same-sex marriage in D.C.!” Though Barry has had drug and tax problems, he told the crowd: “I am a politician who’s moral!” He missed the D.C. council vote on same-sex marriage, but he said he’d have voted against it had he been there. But, last year, he told the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club he’d be voting in favor of same-sex marriage.
Jackson later wrote: “Despite our full-page ad in the local paper, our group’s numerous letters to the council, and direct meetings with the council members, they declared that gay marriage would someday be the law in DC. The next steps in Washington, DC are simple – we must raise awareness in Congress that they can veto this bill.”
Nassau County executive Tom Suozzi now supports gay marriage. Of his previous support for only civil unions, he explains in a New York Times Op-Ed: “As a practicing Catholic … I thought civil unions … would address my concerns regarding both equality and religious liberty. I was wrong. … As I talked to gays and lesbians and heard their stories of pain, discrimination and love, my platitudes about civil unions began to ring hollow”. He says “the examples of Connecticut and Vermont [with a] strong liberty clause allowing religious institutions to opt out of solemnizing same-sex marriage” address his previous concern. “But most important, gays and lesbians have suffered too long from legal discrimination, social marginalization and even violence.” He asks others “to consider changing their minds too”.
The argument for same-sex marriage equality is supported by psychological data. The June issue of the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology cites University of California psychology professor Gregory M. Herek on the key role of the APA in same-sex marriage gains: “The debates preceding these [recent court] decisions raised many factual questions that can be addressed by scientific data, and APA has been at the forefront in presenting those data to policymakers, judges and court justices”.
Pat Robertson’s Regent University now is home to Regent Democrats, an official campus club. The Religious Right’s Republican candidate for President in the 1988 primaries comments: “You know what, [this] reflects the openness of our campus and how open we are to sharing of ideas.” Says Heather Carr, a divinity student who co-founded the club with her law student husband: “People are realizing that being Christian does not always equal Republican. Your faith should direct your politics, not your politics directing your faith.”
Southern Baptist ethicist David Gushee, author of The Future of Faith in American Politics, observes: “Regent is moving outside of the hyper-conservative Christian subculture to be a somewhat broader climate. It actually speaks well of Regent that there is diversity.” He explains: “You can’t really be a university of any quality without allowing your students freedom of affiliation and reflection and political identity”.
Clubs for Democrats are recognized at other evangelical colleges as well, including Anderson, Biola and Wheaton.
Jerry Falwell, Jr. has shut down the student club for Democrats at Liberty University. The son of the late founder explains that “an oversight by an administrator” let the club slip past proper screening. Mark Hine, Liberty’s vice president for student affairs, explains that Democratic support for the gay agenda, socialism and abortion makes it impossible for Liberty to support such a club for its students.
The publicly funded Holocaust Memorial in Brooklyn is to honor all victims of Nazi atrocities – Gays, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled and political prisoners as well as Jews. But Brooklyn Democratic assemblyman Dov Hikind is outraged and he’s rallying protest: “These people are not in the same category as Jewish people”. But commenting “as a Jew” in The New York Post, Menashe Schorr responds: “I have noticed a rather unappealing sense of entitlement that I think often occurs in groups that have endured persecution, whether for reasons of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. It seems to produce a rather narrow world view.”
“Outrage” is a film that alleges “hypocrisy” among politicians and other public personages. Says filmmaker Kirby Dick: “I wanted this film to have a really thoughtful approach.”
While some of the film’s targets were exposed as gay in an undercover sting or were recorded in a compromising situation, others are merely rumored to be gay. One of the so-called “antigay” politicians rumored to be gay is former New York City Mayor Ed Koch. But in 1971, the then-Congressman Koch was among the enthusiastic supporters of the Homosexual Community Counseling Center founded by Ralph Blair. At a time when few politicians were gay-supportive, Koch wrote: “It is clear that a counseling service such as HCCC can make more people conscious of the need to end the discrimination against homosexuals, as well as make homosexuals unashamed of their sexual preference.”
Florida’s United Methodists have rejected a gay-friendly membership amendment. Meeting in annual conference at a historically black college, opponents feared the amendment would prevent ministers from insisting that gay people wishing to become members of United Methodist churches turn away from their “sinful lifestyle”. Two teenage delegates spoke in favor of the amendment as a good news gesture towards gays.
The Episcopal Church’s support of gay men and lesbians risks Moslem violence against African Christians! That’s the complaint of Faith J. H. McDonnell of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. She says: “By pushing sexual politics, Episcopal church leaders are compromising the churches’ witness abroad, exposing Christian brothers and sisters to violence, and unwittingly aiding and abetting the Islamization of Africa and elsewhere.” She cites Sudan’s antigay Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul’s saying that Islamists call his Christians “infidels” for association with Anglicans who bless same-sex relationship and contends that such support gives Moslems what he calls “the upper hand [another excuse] to kill our people”.
When Pope Benedict XVI, on his Africa trip in March, told a reporter that condoms are not the answer to AIDS, he sparked a firestorm of protest. The pope said: “AIDS cannot be overcome with advertising slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem. The solution can only come through a twofold commitment: firstly, the humanization of sexuality, in other words a spiritual and human renewal bringing a new way of behaving towards one another, and secondly, true friendship, above all with those who are suffering, a readiness – even through personal sacrifice – to be present with those who suffer.”
Time magazine called the pope’s remarks “inflammatory rhetoric” and gay activist Wayne Besen called them “unconscionable.”
But “the pope is correct”, says the director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Edward C. Green. According to Green: “There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded Demographic Health Surveys, between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.” Green adds: “The largely medical solutions funded by major donors have had little impact in Africa, the continent hardest hit by AIDS. Instead, relatively simple,
low-cost behavioral change programs – stressing monogamy and delayed sexual activity for young people – have made the greatest headway in fighting or preventing the disease’s spread.”
“We are evangelicals who believe that Scripture does not condemn homosexual relationships”. So said the signatories to an “Open Letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from Evangelical Organisations” prior to the GA’s meeting in May. The GA took up the matter of an Aberdeen congregation’s calling a 37-year-old openly gay minister in a committed gay relationship.
The Letter stated: “As a result of the traditional view on homosexuality, it has been our experience that many gay and lesbian Christians have been forced down a path of self hatred, which all too often leads to loss of faith, breakdown or even suicide”.
Ralph Blair, founder of Evangelicals Concerned, joined Scottish and British signers from other evangelical groups, including Courage chapters in Scotland and England, the Scottish Region of Evangelical Fellowship for Lesbian and Gay Christians, Changing Attitude, Baptist Network Affirming Lesbian & Gay Christians, Christian Lesbians, and Accepting Evangelicals within the Church of England.
The Aberdeen congregation and gay minister were vindicated.
AND FINALLY:
Anatine reporter Mallard Fillmore announced in May: “Shocking new video has surfaced of President Obama, during the campaign, saying … ‘Marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.’ … which”, Mallard comments wryly, “will effectively end his chances of ever winning Miss USA.