Methodist vote spurs gay activists to launch campaign
11 May 2000 (Newsroom) — Gay rights activists in the United Methodist Church have vowed to launch a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in protest of three votes Thursday at the church’s general conference in Cleveland that maintained strictures against homosexuality.
“We’re not interested in floor fights” or debates, said the Rev. Mel White, director of an ecumenical “gay-straight alliance” called Soulforce, in an interview with Newsroom. “We think the Holy Spirit has left the United Methodist Church as a denomination. God is for justice, and when you exclude people from a congregation, God goes out the door with the outcasts.”
The Methodist Church entered its quadrennial conference last week amid talk of a major split between members who defend traditional church teaching and those who believe doctrine should be informed by modern understandings of life. The Rev. Scott Field, chairman of a coalition of Methodist renewal movements, believes schism is unlikely but is certain only of where conservatives stand. “Obviously we’re not going to go anywhere,” he told Newsroom. “It depends on folks on the other side who did not prevail and whether they decide that it’s worth fighting within the Methodist Church or to go elsewhere.”
White’s Laguna Beach, California-based group also plans to assist gay-rights groups within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Episcopal Church as they meet for their national conferences this summer. The Methodist campaign is called “Re-light the Flame,” an allusion to the church’s official logo, which incorporates a flame representing the Holy Spirit.
The plan is for gay-rights groups within the Methodist Church to take the kind of non-violent protests Soulforce organized at the Cleveland convention to congregations across the country that bar same-sex unions and the ordination of self-avowed homosexuals. White said that protesters will target larger Methodist congregations with picketing. Also, gays and lesbians will be urged to withhold their tithes, offerings, and service from congregations that prohibit them from participation in the full life of the church.
Soulforce organized a protest on Wednesday in which about 180 people, including Methodist bishops and superintendents, were arrested for blocking a driveway at the conference’s Cleveland Convention Center site. White says he wants to see 1,000 protestors arrested at the church’s next general conference in four years.
Some 20 percent of the church’s 992 delegates stood in silent protest of a Thursday morning vote that upheld a church law regarding homosexuality as “incompatible” with Christian teaching, according to Field, a conference delegate. Just before the vote, about 75 people blocked the podium in the assembly hall, refusing to leave unless police carried them out, Field said.
The protesters were allowed a two-minute speech in which a spokesman told delegates that their group would not move unless the “incompatibility” clause was voted down. They were allowed to remain, but 30 people were arrested after they surrounded the presiding bishop in protest of the votes. On the balcony a women hung over the rail, wailing and sobbing as she told delegates she had been a lesbian from birth and suffered because of their decisions. Appearing as if she would jump, bystanders pulled her back, Field said.
White insists that his alliance has kept a promise that it would not disrupt the conference. “What folks did inside spontaneously shows their anger and frustration,” he said. “They were not doing actions to change individuals’ hearts and minds. They’re doing it to show how angry they are. If Methodists do things to break up their own convention then we can’t help that.”
On its Web site, the Methodist gay-rights group Affirmation announced the vote on Thursday with the headline: “The body of Christ has been wounded, General Conference votes to continue oppressing LGBT (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) people.” Affirmation is one of several groups in a coalition of Methodists at the conference called AMAR.
Some 65 percent of delegates voted to maintain the incompatibility clause and about 67 percent voted to uphold a ban on ordination of self-avowed, practicing homosexuals. Later, in the afternoon, a prohibition on conducting same-sex unions held up by a similar margin.
“We knew months ago that the vote would go this way,” White said. “The fundamentalists within the United Methodist Church have been working to take over this church for a long time, and that’s why Soulforce is here to say this endless and useless debate should go on no longer.”
Many Methodist ministers say they will continue to conduct same-sex unions in spite of the prohibitions in the Book of Discipline, the church’s book of law.
Field acknowledged that the vote indicates “a significant division of opinion” but said that “orthodox faith is still holding” by a 2-1 margin. “I think delegates should be commended, because it was a very intense atmosphere of intimidation, and they did what they thought was right,” Field said.
Field believes that Thursday’s votes reflect the prevailing view of the 8.4 million members of the church in the U.S. — a view of homosexuality that Christians largely have held for 2,000 years. White compares his struggle to the civil rights movement, however, arguing that a righteous “remnant” of the church eventually has overcome the majority on issues such as slavery and civil rights. His group, Soulforce, styles itself after the non-violent activism of Mohatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Defenders of traditional moral values, however, insist that there is no comparison between an identity that a person is born with, such as race, and homosexuality, which involves choices that the Bible labels as sin. Gay rights groups in the church maintain that homosexuality is not a choice, but a gift from God.
White was a ghost writer for evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell before announcing in 1994 that he is gay. U.S. media noted an apparent breakthrough in relations with conservative Protestants when White and 200 gays and lesbians were invited to meet with 200 members of Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia last year. At that meeting Falwell vowed to never “make statements that can be construed as sanctioning hate or antagonism against homosexuals.”
White believes, however, that the media made more of the encounter than was warranted. “Jerry Falwell did something different when he invited us there, but the consequences of the meeting were minimal,” White said. “He went back to bashing gays when we left town.”
Falwell maintains that there is a difference between talking about gays as people and referring to their behavior — a distinction that White believes is impossible to make.
A member of Field’s coalition, the Confessing Movement, condemned the campaign of Kansas pastor Fred Phelps, who showed up at the Wednesday demonstration with his “God Hates Fags” signs. In its daily dispatch from the conference, the conservative group called Phelps “a hate-spewing, gay-bashing preacher” who “has come to Cleveland to exploit the serious, prayerful deliberations of the United Methodist General Conference.”
Copyright © 2000 Newsroom.
Used with permission.