The Vermont State Supreme Court ruling to establish fairness for same-sex couples was passed by the House as a “civil unions” bill now wending its way through the Senate Judiciary. The Religious Right has descended on the state with an all-out attack against homosexuals. Randall Terry has moved to Vermont to oppose the bill. Thousands of mass-produced postcards as well as ads in the newspapers warn of what they see as horrible consequences (legalized pedophilia, federal defense funds for AIDS care and sex reassignment surgery, pro-gay legislators going to hell, etc.) if the bill should become law. Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family has called on its 3 to 5 million daily listeners to “flood the Vermont legislature with phone calls” and hold them “accountable” for their “attack on marriage.” According to a Focus spokesman, “We cannot allow Vermont to decide the fate of marriage for the rest of this country.” But many Vermont citizens resent all the out-of-state interference in their state’s legal process, so there may be a backlash to much of the antigay onslaught.
The heads of the worldwide Anglican communion have issued a “Communique” on the threat to unity posed by continuing disputes over the public blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of declared non-celibate homosexuals. After a week-long meeting in Portugal, the bishops declared: “We believe that the disagreement over sexual ethics … that clearly exists within and among the Provinces does not necessarily amount to a complete and definitive rupture of communion.” The “Communique” went on to note a previous resolution that “also calls on us all to listen to the experience of homosexuals in the Church” and endorsed “the Archbishop of Canterbury’s … encourage[ment of] dialogue between those who hold that the Church’s historic teaching on this matter is so clearly evident in scripture as to be fixed and final and those who are not convinced that the Bible speaks at all clearly to the questions currently before us.” What is still to be encouraged, the bishops said, is “a careful, patient and pastoral process.” The U.S. Episcopal Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold, noted a “profound sense of healing and deepened communion” from the meeting, but said he was troubled “that sexuality took a disproportionate amount of time, given the more drastic concerns of poverty, world debt and genocide.”
A national committee of the Episcopal Church, commissioned by the denomination’s 1997 General Convention to study same-sex issues and report back, concluded in February by calling for continued study. The committee report noted that the church holds “different opinions, but share[s] one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” The result is that each diocese is still free to follow its own decisions on these matters.
A resolution suggesting that pro-gay-ordination members should leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been proposed by a western Pennsylvania presbytery for consideration at this year’s General Assembly. Those proposing the resolution also declare that the denomination is at an “irreconcilable impasse” on the issues of homosexuality.
Anti-gay United Methodists in the denomination’s California-Nevada Conference met in a strategy session in April to blast the Conference’s decision not to discipline 68 of its ministers who participated in a blessing service for a lesbian couple last year. Some 150 of them discussed disassociating themselves from congregations that are welcoming of gay men and lesbians. They plan to withhold money from the Conference and consider leaving the 8.5-million member denomination if they can take their assets with them.
Salt Lake City’s Mayor Rocky Anderson has issued an executive order prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination in city employment. A similar measure, introduced in this Mormon stronghold’s city council in previous years, was met with public opposition. The mayor said he hoped to avoid such divisiveness this time.
The European Parliament’s recommendation that member states extend to same-sex couples the same legal status that heterosexual couples enjoy “represents an alarm bell” to the Vatican’s representative to the European Union. He said that the recommendation is “worrisome.” The Vatican criticized the call for equal rights as an attack against the “natural patrimony of humanity.” Several European countries, including France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, already legally recognize same-sex unions.
The Diocese of Rome will not intervene to prevent the city from hosting a weeklong international meeting of gays and lesbians in July. In disputes between Roman Catholic officials and city officials in January, the position of the city in support of free expression won out. Mayor Francesco Rutelli said that the city will ensure “maximum respect for and no intrusion into the religious events of the [Roman Catholic’s] Jubilee.”
The historic mea culpa of John Paul II made no reference to the church’s sins against homosexuals — even in his reference to the “our responsibilities as Christians for the evils of today.” But he confessed in terms easily applicable to the church’s antigay attacks, admitting that “even men of the Church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.”
Roger Cardinal Mahony, head of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest in the U.S., has exceeded the confession of the pope by asking for forgiveness from gays and lesbians because of the church’s homophobia. He explained: “There is no saving value in simply naming a group of issues unless we have some real firm purpose of amendment in terms of a real program that seeks to redress the wrong.”
Judaism’s Reform movement has declared same-sex relationships are “worthy of affirmation” through Jewish ritual. Meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina on March 29, the conference representing 1,800 Reform rabbis, became the largest group of American clergy to officially allow its members to perform services of blessing for same-sex couples. Said one rabbi: “The beauty of it is, it leaves it open what rabbis will call it. Some will call it marriage, some will call it a commitment ceremony.” But not all the rabbis supported the decision. One of these said: “reasonable people can come to different conclusions.”
Homosexuals in Islamic countries face torture and execution for being homosexual. Now a gay Muslim has started a Web site for gay and lesbian Muslims around the world. He lives in a large Asian city and, for fear of retribution, he does not use his real name. He reports that he gets e-mails from Muslims who are outraged at the thought of gay and lesbian Muslims. But, from other gay and lesbian Muslims, he hears: “I thought I was the only one!”
Paraphrases of Leviticus 18:22 (taken out of context) were plastered across two billboards in New York City’s borough of Staten Island in March. One, from the so-called Living Bible, read: “Homosexuality is absolutely forbidden, for it is an enormous sin.” Though the sponsor was not identified on the signs, a religious group called Keyword Ministries admitted later that it had paid $1,800 for the advertisements. Keyword’s leader claims to “love homosexuals” and he said that the signs were anonymous because God had inspired him to do it. But Staten Island’s Republican borough president Guy V. Molinari and other local leaders called for the removal of what they deemed hate slogans. Announcements featuring Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog have now replaced the antigay messages.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that a university does not violate the First Amendment by collecting a school-wide student fee for support of a wide range of student groups, including gay student groups. The Religious Right had argued that Christian students should not have to subsidize, even indirectly, any groups that support gay and lesbian students.
The Religious Right’s Louisiana Family Forum supports school support for gay groups, reasoning that attempts to ban gay groups could put religious groups at risk. In its pamphlet, “The Merit of Equal Access: A Primer for Christian School Board Members and Parents,” the LFF objects to some Christians’ “zeal to protect high school campuses from a handful of homosexual activists, [that results in] sacrific[ing] the greater good of all their children.”
Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year-old boy in Rogers, Arkansas, was murdered in September. His body was covered with feces. He died while being repeatedly raped with various objects including an enema filled with the urine of one of his attackers. Since the two men arrested happen to be homosexual and since the GLBT press and the national media elite have largely ignored the story, some commentators suspect self-imposed political correctness, a double-standard in a boy’s murder by homosexuals and a homosexual’s (Matthew Shepard) murder by heterosexuals. The Left-leaning press has tried to excuse its lack of coverage by calling the murder a “local” story that isn’t a “hate” crime. Just as the Shepard murder became a centerpiece for fundraising on the GLBT Left, the Dirkhising murder has become a centerpiece for the fundraising on the Religious Right. D. James Kennedy’s March money appeal uses the boy’s murder to push the notion that “homosexual men prey on adolescent boys” and so good Christian Americans should send him money to fight this “homosexual agenda.”
Sam Butcher, creator of Precious Moments, has added a doll in tribute to Barbara Johnson, founder of Spatula Ministries, an evangelical outreach to parents of gay sons and daughters. Though Johnson has been popular in the “ex-gay” movement in the past, she now insists that she’s never seen a change in a person’s sexual orientation. The 16-inch collectible doll with the typical Precious Moments teardrop eyes, wears a lavender dress and a Johnson trademark floral hat. It is limited to a 1-year production and $10 from the sale of each doll will go to Spatula Ministries.
Once again, the front page testimony of the “ex-gay” Exodus newsletter is not about an ex-gay. The March issue of Update features the testimony of the heterosexual son of a gay man who, according to the son, “still persists in his homosexual choices.” The son is a director of an Exodus ministry in Tennessee. Toward the end of the article, he writes of his distress over his finding these words in I Corinthians: ” … you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.” He concludes: “since my Dad calls himself a ‘brother’ [in the Lord], the tension between unconditional love and the instruction of this verse tears at me inside.”
The featured testimony in the February issue of Update is that of two women who have lived together for over 20 years. Told at an “ex-gay” meeting that they were no longer merely lesbians who were not engaging in sex but that they should consider themselves “heterosexual women,” they admit: “This was hard for us to believe.” Nonetheless, “We decided to see ourselves as God sees us — new creatures.” They continue to share a home together because, as they say, “It is not sinful for heterosexual women to share a home.”
AND FINALLY:
Mary was raped! That’s what was preached at a recent conference of CLOUT (Christian Lesbians OUT). According to one of the speakers, Diane Marie Morrison, Jesus was the product of the rape of Mary by a Roman soldier named Ben Pentera. There is, of course, absolutely no basis for this nonsense in the biblical records, the only original sources on the mother of Jesus. But that inconvenient fact doesn’t stop the CLOUT newsletter from concluding: “In the Magnificat, Luke 1:46-55, it is clear that Mary has come to a wholeness in herself beyond the shame of a Palestinian/woman of color raped under Roman occupation.”