Love on trial

Rev. Amy DeLong, a member of the Wisconsin Annual Conference, will go on trial April 11, 2011 for violating the UMC’s ban on “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” as well as its prohibition of “ceremonies celebrating same-sex unions.”  Rev. DeLong is a devoted United Methodists and a longtime clergy member whose gifts for ministry are obvious and acknowledged.  She and her supporters have set up a website to provide updates on the case and information on how people throughout the country can support her throughout this process. 

This church trial is another example not just of the gross injustice of the UMC’s prejudice against LGBT people but also of the cannibalizing effect it has on the body of the church.  Just two weeks ago, 33 bishops issued a “statement of counsel to the church” calling for the removal of the ban on gay clergy. They noted “disturbing realities…detrimental to the mission of a Church of Jesus Christ,” among them “Bishops being drained of energy by upholding Church Discipline while regarding it as contrary to their convictions” and “Bishops caught between care for the Church by reappointing an effective gay or lesbian pastor and care for the Discipline by charging them under current legislation.” Exactly that is happening in the DeLong trial, where the Committee on Investigation brought it charges with a statement that notes “these charges present a fundamentally unjust circumstance.”

Bishops and other church officials who prosecute cases like DeLong’s may suffer, and the United Methodist Church for sure is harmed by the continued enforcement of bigoted rules, but the most significant injury here is the one inflicted on Rev. DeLong and her family. A close second is the damage done to LGBT people everywhere, both inside the UMC and beyond it, who can interpret this trial only as further evidence that the church rejects who God has made them to be. It is indeed “love on trial.”

In December, DeLong wrote a powerful statement to the Committee on Investigation. Among other things, she offers this sobering observation in it:

I know that discrimination and prejudice are alive and well in our society. But, the other thing I know is that on a daily basis, the only place my partner and I are treated unfairly, the only place we are seen as less than equal, the only place we are called names, the only place we are forced to lie about our love for each other, the only place we fear for our safety and feel crushingly vulnerable is in the church. The only people who have been mean to us simply because we are gay are Christians and more specifically Christians who call themselves United Methodists.

The Committee on Investigation bringing the charges against DeLong noted her “extraordinary courage” in stepping forward and freely acknowledging who she is and the ministry to which she is called. A better way for the committee to honor that courage would have been to match it with their own by refusing to bring charges. “One has a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws,” Martin Luther King observed in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. All of us have a choice, to perpetuate discrimination by complying with discriminatory statutes or to refuse to be complicit in the discrimination by defying them. Amy DeLong understood that choice when she refused to deny marriage rites to a lesbian couple. Committees on investigation and bishops, too, have that choice; they need not be “drained of energy by upholding Church Discipline.”

In the New York Annual Conference, we have that choice as well, and one way that we are making the choice to refuse to discriminate is through our Covenant of Conscience, by which we pledge to make marriage available to all people on an equal basis. Find out more here, and if you are not a signer already, consider signing now as a way to honor Amy DeLong as well as the integrity of the call to minister to all God’s children.