Post by Messenger on Jun 2, 2007 10:07:28 GMT -5
The Institute on Religion & Democracy!
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Bill
Clergy Rally in DC for "GLBT Equality"
John Lomperis
On April 17, many dozens of clergy from around the country boisterously rallied outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to lobby for homosexual rights legislation before Congress.
The liberal clergy affirmed “that we are all God’s children, and our differing sexual orientations and our differing gender identities are not shameful sins, but a gift from God.” Their rally was organized by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which calls itself “America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality.”
HRC was rallying the clergy behind two proposals before Congress: the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Both laws would enshrine “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as legally protected categories, the latter in matters related to crime and the former in employment laws.
Miguel De La Torre, Associate Professor of Social Ethics at United Methodism’s Iliff School of Theology, declared that “as a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian and an ordained Southern Baptist minister,” he was compelled to fight “the oppression faced by our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters.” He called on Congress to “be used by the Almighty as an instrument of salvation and liberation” by passing these two laws to counter physical and “economic violence.” As for “Christians from the far right” who may portray the legislation as conferring “special rights” and ask “where will it all end,” De La Torre declared, “I’ll tell you where it ends: It ends, in the words of the prophet Amos, when justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an everlasting stream!”
Elder Nancy Wilson, head of the largely homosexual Metropolitan Community Churches, reported that some Americans “believe they are doing God a favor when they intimidate, harm, bully, or kill LGBT people,” making it imperative for “people of faith to repudiate religious-based hatred.” No one there cited any statistical or even anecdotal evidence for violence against self-identified “LGBT people” being religiously motivated.
The Rev. Susan Russell, President of Integrity (“the voice of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians in the Episcopal Church USA”), expressed her pride in speaking “to represent the Episcopal Church,” which supports the “hate crimes” law, and to support both bills in the name of the “traditional Christian values” of care for one’s neighbor and “the least of these.” While America claims to stand for “liberty and justice for all,” she lamented that “[w]e are not yet that nation” because homosexuals do not enjoy “the liberty to walk safely on the streets of America protected from bias-motivated violence.” Neither she nor any of the other speakers explained why current laws against assault are insufficient.
As “a sacred activist and a cultural creative,” Bishop Carlton Pearson, author of God is Not a Christian and senior pastor at a Tulsa church that boasts of “the friendliest, trendiest, most radically inclusive worship experience,” called homosexual rights “one of the most significant Civil Rights issues of this century.” In a similar vein, Rev. William Sinkford, President of the 200,000-member Unitarian Universalist Association, characterized these bills as a continuation of the “significant strides” made “in advancing civil rights” in 20th century, broadly declaring that “discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is unacceptable in a nation that prizes equality.”
The Rev. Erin Swenson boasted that in 1996 he had “became the first known mainstream Protestant minister to retain my ordination following a gender transition from male to female” and that his denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), supports the “hate crimes” law. He tied his support for both bills to biblical teaching “that God upholds the most vulnerable among us” and his observation that "there are few more vulnerable than those in the the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community," in which “the ‘T’ remains the most vulnerable.”
Denise Eger, rabbi of a West Hollywood congregation, tied support for ENDA to the Torah’s teachings about “our obligations to be fair to workers.” She also asserted that “90 percent of Americans already support ending working place discrimination based on sexual orientation.”
Rev. Charles Bouchard, a Dominican priest and President of Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, said that while the Roman Catholic Church “does not agree with every position the Human Rights Campaign advocates,” it affirms that “gays and lesbians have the same rights to work, housing, [and] freedom from violence.”
Peggy Campolo, wife of evangelical left activist Tony Campolo, professed to root her 20 years of pro-homosexuality activism in her evangelical faith. “There is a verse in the Old Testament—The Hebrew Bible—that speaks directly to those who will be voting,” on this legislation, she claimed, citing Micah 6:8 (“God has showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justice and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”). She asserted, “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, but Jesus had a whole lot to say about religious types who add their own rules to a Gospel that really says, ‘Whosoever will, may come.’”
Mrs. Campolo lamented, “Some of my evangelical sisters and brothers sing, ‘Just As I Am,’ but mean it for all but my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters.”
Several speakers decried objections that had been raised to the two bills. Sinkford called many of the counter-arguments “blatantly and inexcusably false,” denying that the laws would “create quotas or force churches to hire people who do not share their religious values.” Eger asserted that the “hate crimes” bill was “not a penalty enhancement statute” and “does not squash First Amendment rights to free speech.” Others made similar arguments.
But in his speech introducing the “hate crimes” bill on April 12, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) made clear that it was intended to result in harsher penalties for crimes if they involved certain federally classified categories of hate.
HRC-produced brochures distributed at the event plugged their pro-homosexuality “weekly preaching resource” and offered guidance on pro-homosexuality activism within congregations.
A distributed talking-points sheet reported that since 2000, dozens of corporations (including AT&T, Eastman Kodak, General Mills, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Shell Oil, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Yahoo!) have lobbied for laws similar to ENDA.
John Lomperis
On April 17, many dozens of clergy from around the country boisterously rallied outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to lobby for homosexual rights legislation before Congress.
The liberal clergy affirmed “that we are all God’s children, and our differing sexual orientations and our differing gender identities are not shameful sins, but a gift from God.” Their rally was organized by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which calls itself “America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality.”
HRC was rallying the clergy behind two proposals before Congress: the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Both laws would enshrine “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as legally protected categories, the latter in matters related to crime and the former in employment laws.
Miguel De La Torre, Associate Professor of Social Ethics at United Methodism’s Iliff School of Theology, declared that “as a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian and an ordained Southern Baptist minister,” he was compelled to fight “the oppression faced by our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters.” He called on Congress to “be used by the Almighty as an instrument of salvation and liberation” by passing these two laws to counter physical and “economic violence.” As for “Christians from the far right” who may portray the legislation as conferring “special rights” and ask “where will it all end,” De La Torre declared, “I’ll tell you where it ends: It ends, in the words of the prophet Amos, when justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an everlasting stream!”
Elder Nancy Wilson, head of the largely homosexual Metropolitan Community Churches, reported that some Americans “believe they are doing God a favor when they intimidate, harm, bully, or kill LGBT people,” making it imperative for “people of faith to repudiate religious-based hatred.” No one there cited any statistical or even anecdotal evidence for violence against self-identified “LGBT people” being religiously motivated.
The Rev. Susan Russell, President of Integrity (“the voice of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians in the Episcopal Church USA”), expressed her pride in speaking “to represent the Episcopal Church,” which supports the “hate crimes” law, and to support both bills in the name of the “traditional Christian values” of care for one’s neighbor and “the least of these.” While America claims to stand for “liberty and justice for all,” she lamented that “[w]e are not yet that nation” because homosexuals do not enjoy “the liberty to walk safely on the streets of America protected from bias-motivated violence.” Neither she nor any of the other speakers explained why current laws against assault are insufficient.
As “a sacred activist and a cultural creative,” Bishop Carlton Pearson, author of God is Not a Christian and senior pastor at a Tulsa church that boasts of “the friendliest, trendiest, most radically inclusive worship experience,” called homosexual rights “one of the most significant Civil Rights issues of this century.” In a similar vein, Rev. William Sinkford, President of the 200,000-member Unitarian Universalist Association, characterized these bills as a continuation of the “significant strides” made “in advancing civil rights” in 20th century, broadly declaring that “discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is unacceptable in a nation that prizes equality.”
The Rev. Erin Swenson boasted that in 1996 he had “became the first known mainstream Protestant minister to retain my ordination following a gender transition from male to female” and that his denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), supports the “hate crimes” law. He tied his support for both bills to biblical teaching “that God upholds the most vulnerable among us” and his observation that "there are few more vulnerable than those in the the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community," in which “the ‘T’ remains the most vulnerable.”
Denise Eger, rabbi of a West Hollywood congregation, tied support for ENDA to the Torah’s teachings about “our obligations to be fair to workers.” She also asserted that “90 percent of Americans already support ending working place discrimination based on sexual orientation.”
Rev. Charles Bouchard, a Dominican priest and President of Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, said that while the Roman Catholic Church “does not agree with every position the Human Rights Campaign advocates,” it affirms that “gays and lesbians have the same rights to work, housing, [and] freedom from violence.”
Peggy Campolo, wife of evangelical left activist Tony Campolo, professed to root her 20 years of pro-homosexuality activism in her evangelical faith. “There is a verse in the Old Testament—The Hebrew Bible—that speaks directly to those who will be voting,” on this legislation, she claimed, citing Micah 6:8 (“God has showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justice and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”). She asserted, “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, but Jesus had a whole lot to say about religious types who add their own rules to a Gospel that really says, ‘Whosoever will, may come.’”
Mrs. Campolo lamented, “Some of my evangelical sisters and brothers sing, ‘Just As I Am,’ but mean it for all but my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters.”
Several speakers decried objections that had been raised to the two bills. Sinkford called many of the counter-arguments “blatantly and inexcusably false,” denying that the laws would “create quotas or force churches to hire people who do not share their religious values.” Eger asserted that the “hate crimes” bill was “not a penalty enhancement statute” and “does not squash First Amendment rights to free speech.” Others made similar arguments.
But in his speech introducing the “hate crimes” bill on April 12, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) made clear that it was intended to result in harsher penalties for crimes if they involved certain federally classified categories of hate.
HRC-produced brochures distributed at the event plugged their pro-homosexuality “weekly preaching resource” and offered guidance on pro-homosexuality activism within congregations.
A distributed talking-points sheet reported that since 2000, dozens of corporations (including AT&T, Eastman Kodak, General Mills, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Shell Oil, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Yahoo!) have lobbied for laws similar to ENDA.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bill