Methodists to Offer Marriage Celebrations to Same-Sex Families

Nearly a thousand United Methodists are ready to defy their denomination and offer marriage ceremonies to same-sex couples in the name of love and family parity.

The membership of a Methodist group called the We Do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality issued a media release on Oct. 17 in which they declared their willingness to recognize and celebrate deep lifetime commitments between people of the same gender. The group includes members from New York and Connecticut, the release said. The marriage equality movement the group has committed itself to is called the We Do! Project.

"In an unprecedented move in any major religious denomination, We Do! is not only bypassing the formal rules of the church, but also reaching out directly to LGBT groups in New York and Connecticut to let them know about the new network," the media release said.

"This morning the group published a list of all its members: Clergy members who will perform weddings for gay couples, lay members of the denomination who support them, and congregations who have adopted policies to formally make weddings available to all couples," the release added.

"We refuse to discriminate against any of God's children and pledge to make marriage equality a lived reality within the New York Annual Conference, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression," read a statement by the group titled A Covenant of Conscience.

The statement was "signed by 164 clergy members, 732 lay people and six entire congregations," noted the release. "In all, 74 congregations within the New York Annual Conference (NYAC) are represented among the signers. NYAC is the regional church body representing United Methodist congregations from Long Island to the Catskills and in southern Connecticut."

"The recognition of the full humanity, sacred worth, and equal rights of gay and lesbian people is crucial to the civil rights struggle of our time," the Covenant of Conscience reads. "Gay, lesbian, and straight United Methodist laity and clergy are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

"The continuing denial of full access to all the rights and privileges of church membership in the United Methodist Church is causing deep spiritual harm to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and is a threat to us all," the Covenant's text continues.

"We cannot tolerate the Church's injustice and discrimination any longer and, out of our Christian faith and Wesleyan love, we feel bound to respond and together to make the following declaration:

"Pastoral care and the sacraments and rituals of the church are means of grace by which the lives of all Christians are blessed by God. Therefore we, as congregations and as individual laypersons and clergy, declare our commitment to offer such means of grace to all persons on an equal basis. We refuse to discriminate against any of God's children and pledge to make marriage equality a lived reality within the New York Annual Conference, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression," the Covenant of Conscience adds.

"My ordination vows require me to minister to all people in my congregation," said the Rev. Sara Lamar-Sterling, who serves at New Haven's First and Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven.

"This is about pastoral care, about welcoming all people, but especially the marginalized and the oppressed, like Jesus did," added Lamar-Sterling.

The release noted that pastors such as Lamar-Sterling had put their careers as United Methodist clergy on the line by signing on to the Covenant of Conscience and declaring themselves ready to officiate at same-sex weddings, which are legally valid in both New York and Connecticut.

"Over the years, many individual United Methodist clergy have defied the church's ban, but the We Do! Project marks the first time an organized network of clergy has done so, and done so with the support of many hundreds of lay members of the church," the release noted.

The release cited the denomination's Book of Discipline, which is "the rulebook that governs the country's third largest Christian denomination," quoting one relevant anti-gay passage in which the Book of Discipline declares, "Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches."

"It is one of several anti-gay provisions of the church, which since 1972 has declared 'the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching,' " the media release said.

"The We Do! Project has been over a year in the making and has been followed by similar efforts in 11 other conferences within the UMC," added the release. "All told, over 1,000 clergy in 19 states and the District of Columbia have signed a pledge vowing to extend their ministry to all couples seeking the church's blessing for their relationships.

"The growing pastoral movement has caused a stir within the church and is expected to have reverberations at the upcoming General Conference," added the release. "The church General Conference meets quadrennially to revise the Discipline and the issue of LGBT exclusion has been hotly debated at each General Conference in the last 40 years," the release went on. "The next General Conference will be April 24 through May 4, 2012, in Tampa, Florida."

While some people of the cloth have stood up for the human and family rights of gays and lesbians and mounted theologically informed arguments against the Biblically-based anti-gay positions taken by many evangelicals, others have taken just as fiercely to the opposite point of view, denying that gays and lesbians are part of God's plan just as they are and claiming that it is contrary to God's will for gays and lesbians to form deep, long-lasting bonds that include a rich and rewarding family life.

Even as new books reconciling the sexuality of gays and lesbians with Christian doctrine, such as "Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics" by Jonathan Dudley and "God vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality" by Jay Michaelson have come to the shelves, so have books that portray gays as suffering from some form of pathology. Some such tomes make the claim--contradicted by emerging science and by mental health experts--that homosexuality is either a "choice" or some form of dysfunction in which naturally heterosexual individuals only think that they are innately attracted to others of the same gender.

Gay = 'Broken?'

The author of one book, titled "Surviving Sexual Brokenness: What Grace Can Do," recently made the assertion that gay Christians must put aside their sexuality in order to be reunited with God. The writer, Thom Hunter, also claimed that pro-GLBT equality theologians were offering lies, and not broader truths about the human condition and human connection to God, when they promoted the idea of sexual minorities as being God's children just as they are.

"A big part of the problem, Hunter said, is that mainstream Christian churches have often turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to members who struggle with sexual issues," an Oct. 21 press release promoting Hunter's book said. "Culture has moved into fill that void with, he said, carefully-tweaked but attractive untruths."

"The church is woefully weak in its efforts to help members who struggle with homosexual temptations and who want to know what the Bible really says and means," Hunter declared.

"The record was dismal even before the pro-gay 'theologians' realized they could usurp the position and play with the Word of God just enough look compassionate, curling their pointing finger to lure the exhausted with promises that they can live as they 'were intended' and shake off all the weight of centuries of Biblical ignorance," added the book's author. "They're not told of the sorrow that eventually unfolds in the life of any Christian who puts anything above God."

The press release said that Hunter assigns culpability to both pro- and anti-gay people of faith, saying that "one side--pro-gay theologians--twist the truth, and the other, mainline Christian leaders--neglect it."

Hunter went on to frame the issue of one not of love and commitment, but one of selfishness.

"Embracing gay theology requires we believe God wants us place our personal satisfaction above His truth," the writer stated. "That should put a new twist on 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' "

The book's author equated innate feelings of sexual attraction, romance, and devotion to "temptation," the suggestion being that to explore those feelings is, by necessity, to fall into sinfulness.

"Just consider for a moment what the world would be like if we decided that we are all to be guided in our choices by whatever temptation we carry," Hunter said.

The writer also implied that theologians with a loving message of inclusiveness were deliberately and cynically manipulating gay people of faith for their own ends, saying, "Gay theologians are using Christian strugglers as pawns for their flawed understanding of Biblical instruction."

But as the message gays themselves have struggled to put across to their religiously-motivated detractors gradually takes root, and as science accumulates evidence that gays are the product of prenatal and physiological factors and do not "choose" their romantic or sexual orientations, even the most religiously anti-gay equality voices have begun to take on a different tenor.

Among them is John Smid, who once headed "ex-gay" group Love in Action. Smid recently owned up in his blog to the realization that gays are not turned into heterosexuals by programs like the one he previously directed. Moreover, Smid admitted that he is a gay man who remains gay despite being in a loving marriage with a female spouse--and, Smid wrote, he knew he was never going to change into a heterosexual man.

"One cannot repent of something that is unchangeable," Smid wrote in his blog, posted on the website for his new venture, a ministry called Grace Rivers.

"I also want to reiterate here that the transformation for the vast majority of homosexuals will not include a change of sexual orientation. Actually I've never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual," Smid added.

Part of Smid's own conversion came from his eventual admission that gays can be, and are, people of integrity and good will. That insight came to Smid after he met filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox, whose documentary, "This Is What Love in Action Looks Like," examined the forced admission of a young man, then 16, into one of the group's programs to turn him straight. The young man posted a message online about being forced into the program, and protesters showed up to lend him support and draw attention to the two months that he was held in the "ex-gay" facility.

"When Morgan and I met for the very first time right after the protest, what I saw in Morgan was a man of such character," Smid said to The Daily Beast, which ran a story about Smid on Oct. 13. "I saw someone who was humble, who was open to being honest, someone that I really felt drawn to.

"It just opened me up to realize I had not been willing to admit that there were gay people like Morgan," Smid added.

Fox also spoke to the publication, saying that he had heard Smid's private musings about the ineffectual nature of "ex-gay" programs long before Smid publicly admitted that attempts to "cure" gays are useless.

"So the fact that he is now making those statements known on a public level is a huge leap," Fox told The Daily Beast.

That leap in comprehension was accompanied by some understanding of the harm such programs can cause. Mental health professionals have long warned that when "ex-gay" therapies fail to deliver, gays who have gone through the programs--and often have been told that they are destined to go to Hell for being gay--are liable to be cast into even deeper shame and despair. Smid offered a heartfelt invitation in his blog.

"If you have been wounded by me or harmed through the hands of my leadership," he wrote, "please come to me and allow an opportunity for me to personally apologize with the hope that we can both be released from the bondage of unforgiveness."

The Daily Beast talked to one participant in the program who not only was not "cured" but also created a theatrical work about his experiences.

"I don't think he yet understands quite the damage and the harm he has done," said Peterson Toscano, whom the Daily Beast said had put himself through two years of Love in Action. "It was a very destructive process mentally, emotionally, spiritually, sexually--all across the board."

Toscano, in an Oct. 13 comment at Box Turtle Bulletin, called the methods used by Love in Action "psychological torture," and added, "It is a complicated and delicate matter when a former abuser admits wrong and seeks to rebuild [a] relationship."