Newsletter of EVANGELICALS CONCERNED, INC

Fall 1999

Romans 8

Followers of Mel White and Jerry Falwell met for historic get-togethers in Lynchburg, Virginia, October 23 and 24. Some 200 gay men and lesbians (including a few graduates of Falwell’s Liberty University) led by White, a former faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary and ghost-writer of Falwell’s autobiography, met with an equal number of men and women from Falwell’s local institutions. They sat down together to break down stereotypes, four from each delegation at tables of eight people and bottled water (Falwell nixed snacks after his Religious Right cohorts insisted that the Bible forbids "eating with sinners"). Both White and Falwell addressed the main 90-minute gathering in the gym next to the church. Said Falwell: "The only deal I can offer today is to be your friend, to love you, to keep my big mouth shut when it needs to be shut." Both White and Falwell expressed satisfaction in the fact that they all met together without angrily attacking each other. They worshipped together at Falwell’s church on Sunday morning. Both groups plan to work together to build a Habitat for Humanity "agape house" in Lynchburg. The house is to be named for the late black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a gay man. During the weekend, some antigay fundamentalists and some anti-Christian gay activists protested outside the church. Brian Randall, a gay 1991 graduate of Liberty University summed it all up by saying: "It’s a tiny, tiny step, but – you know what? It’s a step."

Mel White’s Soulforce summer newsletter carried an account of his recent conversation with 70-year-old James Lawson, the black United Methodist clergyman who trained Martin Luther King, Jr. in "soul force" strategies. White writes: "During a lunch with Gary and me, Dr. Lawson said, ‘Your struggle for civil rights is harder than ours.’ I was stunned. I asked him to explain. ‘We had our families and our churches on our side,’ he replied. ‘You have neither.’"

"Changing is not the goal of Courage" (the Roman Catholic "ex-gay" ministry) according to Fr. James B. Lloyd who has been running a chapter of Courage for the past five years. In a front page interview in the conservative National Catholic Register (August 22-28, 1999), Lloyd says: "I’m pessimistic about change. I haven’t seen that much. But I’ve seen enormous evidence of containment." He says that the "heavy accent is on chastity .. self-restraint … going to Mass every day, saying the rosary, doing spiritual reading." His group is made up of men ranging in age from 23 to 74, including a street prostitute, priests and Protestant ministers. His view is that, among these homosexuals, "promiscuity is fairly rampant [and] masturbation is rampant. … they’re also generally narcissistic."
     Lloyd says he asked Fr. John Harvey, founder of Courage, to explain why some priests are so opposed to the work of Courage. Harvey thinks it’s because many priests "don’t think chastity is possible. [but] That’s the keynote of the whole Courage thing. We get difficulties from a lot of nuns: They allow the emotional to override the real and ask questions like, ‘How can you deny people love?’" Says Lloyd: "We give no quarter to the enemy, the enemy being one’s sexual deviancy or impulses to act out." According to this priest/psychologist, the church’s "healing ministry" to homosexuals is one of "compassion" and he quotes an out-dated comment by Atlanta Episcopal Bishop Emeritus Bennett J. Simms: "Compassion does not mean endorsement." Simms has long since changed his mind and now endorses gay and lesbian relationships.

Joe Dallas of the Exodus "ex-gay" network was a featured speaker at the annual Courage conference in Washington in August.

The 1999 Exodus "ex-gay" conference was said to be the largest ever – 1,200 in attendance. The large number was due mainly, according to Exodus leader Bob Davies, to the national "ex-gay" media blitz over the past year. The conference was held in July on the campus of Wheaton College, though it was not sponsored by the college.
      One celibate pro-"ex-gay" delegate who attended this, his second Exodus conference, writes that, contrary to a popular misconception of the "ex-gay" movement, "I have never heard anyone [at the Exodus conferences] say he used to be gay and is now a heterosexual." He notes that the relatively few "men who change and marry, deny themselves sexually. … These are the men who succeed. They deny themselves, deny their natural inclinations, and completely deny any sexual outlet. … As Christians their only option is to live their lives alone and in celibacy." He concludes that the "ex-gay" ministry "is not for everyone" and that "God alone knows who will and will not benefit from ex-gay ministries like Exodus" but that "we have every reason to believe that, with time and more expertise gained in ex-gay ministries like Exodus, more people will be helped in the future. Praise the Lord!" [Someone to Talk To, September-October, 1999]

Anthony Falzarano, the founding director of an "ex-gay" group known as P-Fox (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays), blames the Religious Right for not supporting the "ex-gay" movement while, at the same time, using its claims to drum up financial support for its own antigay interests. In a press conference televised on C-SPAN in September, Falzarano – who says he used to be one of the late Right-winger Roy Cohn’s "kept boys" – says that after the "ex-gay" media blitz "the Christian Coalition did not send us a dime … D. J. Kennedy did not send us a dime. … That’s quite disturbing." Nonetheless, according to Falzarano, the "ex-gay" movement receives about $2 million annually. However, he says, the movement is losing chapters all across the country.
     In August, the P-FOX board issued a statement saying Falzarano was dismissed of "necessity." Falzarano and the P-FOX board are both claiming to be P-FOX and are warning supporters not to donate to the other.

Thomas D. Hanks, who teaches at the Latin American Biblical University in Costa Rica, gave his testimony during the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA this summer in Fort Worth. He began by saying: "My name is Tom Hanks – not the Hollywood Oscar winner, but an ordained Presbyterian missionary, theologian and author … . However, for more than 40 years I was quite an accomplished actor as a closeted gay." He went on: "First as a journalism professor at Wheaton College, and then at Princeton Theological Seminary, 1957-60, I was encouraged by professional psychologists to try to change my sexual orientation by psychoanalysis and marriage. Later Presbyterian missionary colleagues involved in ex-gay ministries sought to ‘cure’ my homosexuality with prayer, fasting and involvement in the charismatic movement. … All the tremendous pressure and techniques to change forced me to conform to heterosexual norms in behavior, but they never had the slightest effect in changing my sexual desires and fantasies. … Jesus said that the wise person builds his/her house upon the rock of this teaching (Matthew 7:24-27), but I now realize that most of my life and career was built on the sand of pseudo-science and gross misinterpretation of the Bible."

A forum on homosexuality and public policy appears in the evangelical magazine, Christianity Today (October 4, 1999). CT convened four evangelical Christian leaders to "address homosexuality in the public sphere." According to the magazine, all of the participants "started from the assumption that genital intimacy between persons of the same sex is not scriptural and is incompatible with the holiness to which God calls Christian disciples." The four were: Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw, Covenant Seminary professor of theology David Jones, Eastern College psychology professor Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, and Dallas Seminary theology professor Stephen Spencer. Though Spencer is reported to have said very little – and all of it rather inhospitable to gay people – the other three made some supportive statements. Mouw said he’d "seen situations where parents of a person dying of AIDS would not allow his long-term partner in the room. That’s just horrible. You may want to say things happen within that friendship that you don’t approve of, but it’s wrong to keep people of abiding friendships from being together when one of them is dying." With reference to "same-sex, faithful relationships," Mouw notes that his colleagues are "saying that the law should recognize persons who live together and have deep and abiding friendships, whether or not those friendships are genitally intimate" and Jones asserts "It’s not the state’s business whether they’re chaste or not." Says Van Leeuwen: "The state has a compelling interest and Christians have a compelling interest in people’s emotional and economic commitments to one another. If people can demonstrate that they are emotionally and economically committed to one another, then they should have some of the tax benefits in that particular culture that would be given to a married couple." But, she says, "we don’t call them marriages. … We could call them economic units. Economic units encourage people to support each other, to be there for each other." She adds that it must be remembered that "Jesus was, in some ways, considered a family breaker. He relativized marriage and said, ‘Your first family is the family of God.’ I think about [the late gay historian] John Boswell’s book The Kindness of Strangers, a history of the adoption of foundlings. This is another example of legitimate models of nonbiological community within the history of Christianity that we need to respect and resurrect." On the matter of sodomy statutes, Jones says "I don’t think they’re necessary." He also says: "We need to assert in a strong voice that just as we give civil rights to adulterers, so also people that we believe are involved in homosexual sin have civil rights. Quite a different question is whether homosexuals need special protection rights." Jones adds: "We must be intolerant of persecution of gays just because they’re gay. We must send out the message that persecution of gay people, by their jokes or sneers or whatever, put down people, who are made in the image of God, just because of this sin." Mouw concludes: "They are too real to me as human beings, and in some cases as Christian human beings, for me to stereotype them and to treat them as less than human. At the same time, I have a sense that many people in the secular gay/lesbian community haven’t seen a very human face of evangelicalism. They need to be as caught up short by the human realities of the people that they disagree with, as many of us have when we’ve befriended homosexual persons or found out that many of our good friends are in fact homosexual." Van Leeuwen concludes: "We need to say, ‘Yes, we are together on the Nicene Creed,’ but there are secondary principles on which we can and do legitimately disagree."

Many readers of The Baptist Courier, the Southern Baptist magazine for South Carolina, were outraged by a guest column in the July 8 issue. It was written as an "open letter to SC Baptists from parents of a gay child" and called for an appreciation of the anguish of gay youth targeted by antigay rhetoric and behavior in the church. The magazine’s top editor, Don Kirkland, who has been with the publication for 25 years, wrote afterwards: "If events can scorch a soul, the happenings of recent days have don that to mine. I have deservedly received the most severe criticism of my career in Christian journalism." He says he printed the piece as a "guest viewpoint" simply to appeal for "a more compassionate spirit [but that readers took it to be] "an attempt to justify [homosexuality]." Kirkland says he was naïve. The parents who wrote the column said they were "heartbroken" at what Kirkland has faced and very disappointed in the viciousness of the antigay response. Not all have been negative, however. Said a 72-year-old pastor from Dean Swamp Baptist Church, "I didn’t think people hated that much." One letter came in from a young gay man whose family reunited as a result of the article.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, on June 29, held a confidential day-long meeting with supporters of gay equality in the Church of England. Some 30 bishops and other clergy and laity attended the meeting with George Carey at his Lambeth Palace.

Edinburgh Bishop David Holloway, head of the Anglican Church in Scotland, has come out in favor of the full ordination of priests who are actively homosexual. According to Holloway: "What you do with your sexual organs is not, I think, the moral question. The moral question is the nature of the relationship and whether it is violent or abusive."

Fr. Robert Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick have been ministering to gay and lesbian Roman Catholics for nearly three decades. After 15 years of investigating, church officials have declared that the two have "caused confusion" and "harmed the community of the church" by allowing "ambiguities and errors" to influence their public discussion of homosexuality and so they are now barred from continuing their ministry of pastoral support. Nugent and Gramick are accused of not sufficiently emphasizing the official teaching that all homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered" and "evil." According to the assessment of the editor of the Jesuit magazine, America, "On the positive side, it’s clear that the Vatican took a long time before it made its decision. On the negative side, there’s very little specificity in the report from the Vatican about what they were doing that was contrary to church teaching."
     In September, Nugent resumed his public speaking to general audiences, avoiding "a pastoral setting." He says: "Canon lawyers tell me these things must be interpreted very narrowly." Meanwhile, Gramick is seeking to have the ban lifted while she seeks "creative solutions" to keep on supporting gay and lesbian Catholics and their families.

Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice came to the aid of three Minnesota state employees who, after refusing to pay attention during an employee sensitivity training session on gay people and reading their Bibles instead, received letters of reprimand. A federal magistrate has now ruled that their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion was violated. Meanwhile, the ACLJ has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Louisville, Kentucky on behalf of a medical doctor who says his right to discriminate against gays is being infringed upon, following amendments to Louisville’s anti-discrimination ordinance. According to Jeff Vessels of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, the doctor’s argument "follows the same line of logic that has been used in the past to justify employment discrimination against women, racial and ethnic minorities and even people of religions that differ from the employer’s." In another ACLJ action, five Massachusetts municipalities have received letters warning them that their domestic partner benefits programs violate the newest ruling of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court and that the ACLJ will take them to court unless they voluntarily drop their benefits programs.

Jesus Music veteran Marsha Stevens, whose folk hymn, "For Those Tears I Died" (or "Come to the Water") is now a standard in Christian hymnals, has released a new CD entitled The Waiting’s Over (BALM Ministries – www.allfaith.com/BALM) About the title song, written by Stevens along with her son John, she says: "I meet people at every concert who are sure that they have somehow been left out of the gospel, that somehow Romans 8 doesn’t apply to them." The song’s chorus asks gay and lesbian Christians in particular: "Don’t you miss the peace you knew before your wounded heart withdrew?" Driving their RV, Stevens and her partner, Suzanne McKeag, travel nearly 5,000 miles a month in lesbian and gay communities, evangelizing through her gospel music.

Sister Mary Elizabeth provides the world’s largest electronic collection of AIDS/HIV information. Her service, AEGIS (AIDS Education Global Information System) is a labor of love operated out of her mobile home in Southern California. By the end of the year, AEGIS will include some ten million keyword-searchable and sorted files. According to a feature article in A&U, "America’s AIDS Magazine," (October 1999): "In the last two years, with the growing profitability of the Web, the Washington Post and Reuters news service both chose to renege on offers to provide free articles to AEGIS. … The New York Times gladly offers access – at $100 an article. It’s the mercenary attitude, as well as corporate stonewalling, that makes the normally placid nun bristle. ‘We’re not going to win the pandemic if we’re just looking at the dollar signs.’"
     After having served in the Navy as an aeronautics engineer for seventeen years as a man, she underwent gender reassignment surgery. "The day after saying her vows as an Episcopalian nun, the media broke the story of her gender reassignment. ‘The church accepted my past, until it became public; then they abandoned ship quickly. But I made my vows to God, not to Church, so I stuck it out.’" In 1997 she transferred her membership to the American Catholic Church.
     The article reports that "the stagnant funding levels, plus an inherited eye disease which will eventually cause blindness, will make it difficult to keep the rapidly growing system up and running."

African Americans are now nearly 10 times as likely to contract HIV as white Americans as the "de-gaying" of AIDS continues in this country and around the world. Black gay male youth are more than 5 times as likely to contract HIV as other gay male youth. National Association of People with AIDS head Cornelius Baker says it is "one of the worst catastrophes we’ve seen [in the black community] since slavery."

With only 10% of the world’s population, Africa is home to 70% of the world’s 40 million people infected with HIV. Zimbabwe has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection in the world, with about 20% to 25% of the total population infected. According to an Irish missionary in Zimbabwe, "Life expectancy has dropped from 67 years to 40 years in the last eight years." There are 5,500 AIDS-related funerals every day in Africa.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe is lobbying the country’s Constitutional Commission to outlaw "the morally perverted practice" of homosexuality under the new national constitution now being drafted. Zimbabwe already has a criminal sodomy statute with penalties of up to seven years imprisonment for violation.

California State Senator William J. "Pete" Knight, (R-Palmdale) is sponsoring an antigay initiative to restrict legal marriage in California to "one man and one woman." It will be on the ballot in March of 2000. He’s been trying to do this ever since he was elected in 1992.
     In response to his father’s political efforts, Knight’s own gay son, David, has written an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times in which he says: "I must speak out publicly about what I perceive to be his willful, blind ignorance on this issue." David Knight continues: "I believe, based on my experience, that his is a blind, uncaring, uninformed, knee-jerk reaction to a subject about which he knows nothing and wants to know nothing." The son says he and his father have never discussed his homosexuality and "I know that he never discussed the issue with his gay brother who died of AIDS three years ago. As far as I can determine, he’s made no attempt at understanding the issue." He says that after he came out as gay, his father ended their relationship: "I can’t begin to explain the hurt that has come from this rejection. I miss him. … When I was at the Air Force Academy, or when he was speaking at my pilot training graduation, or when I was returning from the Gulf War, where I flew fighters for my country, my father was very proud of me. His love for and pride in me, I assume, was because I was his son. I am the same son today." Other members of the family have embraced David and the gay partner with whom he lives in Baltimore. Following the publication of David’s column, Senator Knight issued a statement saying: "I care deeply about my son. … I regret that [he] felt he needed to force a private family matter into the public forum." However, it was the elder Knight who went public with the information about the family’s homosexuality back in 1996, in an effort to pre-empt a San Francisco newspaper’s report.
     The manager for the No on Knight campaign, has said: "The ‘Knight Initiative’ is not, as Pete Knight and its backers claim, about defending marriage. It’s about attacking families. We need only look at the impact of Pete Knight’s beliefs on his own family to see what his initiative is truly about and what it would do to families across the state."

The Religious Right’s efforts to pre-empt the possibility of same-gender marriage is analogous to pre-emptive laws against interracial marriage that were enforceable in 17 states when the Supreme Court declared them invalid in 1967. An Alabama constitutional provision, for example, had declared: "The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or descendant of a Negro." The church establishment in Alabama was fully behind this prohibition.
     Another analogy is the case of the Nazi law for the Safeguarding of German Blood and German Honor: "Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or German-related blood are forbidden. Marriages which have been performed in spite of this law, even if they have been performed in a foreign country, are void." This statute was overturned after the collapse of the Third Reich.

AND FINALLY:

The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo has two male Griffin vultures that built a nest together and have raised two baby birds. Bird keeper Sharon Sterling says: "We’re very proud of them. We think they’ve done a marvelous job. They’ve behaved extremely well, the best parents we’ve ever seen."

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