“The derogatory rules and restrictions in the Book of Discipline are immoral and unjust and no longer deserve our loyalty and obedience. Thus the time has come for those of us who are faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ to do what is required of us….The time has come to join in an act of Biblical obedience. I call on the more than 1,100 clergy [who have signed marriage initiatives] to stand firm in their resolve to perform marriages for same-sex couples and to do so in the course of their normal pastoral duties, thus defying the laws that prohibit them from doing so….The time for talking is over. It’s time for us to act in defiance of unjust words of immoral and derogatory discrimination and laws that are doing harm to our GLBT sisters and brothers.”

So said Bishop Melvin Talbert on the closing day of General Conference. The occasion was a press conference organized by the Love Your Neighbor coalition to highlight the nationwide work of clergy who have pledged to marry all couples, gay and straight, through organized marriage initiatives like MIND’s We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality. It was a fitting way to end the coalition’s GC witness, lifting up those who have already found a way to move past the paralysis and spiritual crisis caused by the UMC’s requirement to discriminate at the end of two weeks of distinctly un-holy conferencing that only deepened that spiritual crisis.

Talbert was one of 14 active and retired bishops at the press conference. These same bishops, however, did very little during the two-week verbal and legislative assaults on LGBT people that characterized much of GC. Indeed, this quadrennial meeting of the church was remarkable for both the intensity and the extensiveness of anti-gay hate that was expressed. LGBT people were exposed again and again to hate speech that accused them of bestiality, called them drug addicts, prostitutes and alcoholics and denounced them as evil. Legislative petitions to remove the Incompatibility Clause and end the exclusion of LGBT people from ministry and marriage were defeated.

These developments dashed hopes that after 40 years in the spiritual wilderness of prejudice and exclusion the UMC might finally embrace the radical inclusivity of the Gospel and welcome LGBT people. The unsuccessful battle to end UMC bigotry against gays and lesbians was part of a larger struggle at this General Conference for the soul of the United Methodist Church and its Wesleyan roots. Both the breadth of the attacks on the church’s founding principles and the near-constant protest organized by members of the Love Your Neighbor coalition were unprecedented.

From almost the very beginning, LGBT people and their allies sent up a cry of protest that the conference was ignoring Wesley’s simple rule of “do no harm.” That became the unofficial theme of the progressive witness throughout GC, as harm after harm was done.

A dialogue time on the second day of GC set aside for “holy conversation” about sexuality led to LGBT people being “bullied emotionally, spiritually and physically, and it didn’t seem like anyone did anything,” as Mark Miller movingly summarized the following night on the conference floor. Miller, an openly gay delegate and the UMC’s best known music director, asked other LGBT delegates to stand with him, and was then cut off and ruled out of order. But the witness continued after the evening session, when hundreds of people stood in silent protest outside the plenary meeting space.

As week two unfolded and focused on plenary debate, the battle to change the prejudiced language of the Book of Discipline was already lost following committee votes that shot down proposals for inclusivity. On May 2, several hundred people walked onto the floor and used the people’s mic to proclaim this message:

The General Conference has broken Wesley's General Rule by doing harm to young adults, people of color, gay and lesbian people, women and others.
Confusion has taken the place of Holy Conferencing.
Legalism has obscured love.
Fear has silenced faith….
We are committed to following Jesus Christ to embody God's love and justice through the United Methodist Church.
We will work passionately for racial justice.
We will embody full inclusiveness for people of all sexual orientations.
We will celebrate people of all gender identities.
We are global, connectional, and repentant of colonialism.
We will be a people of peace.
We will proclaim the stewardship of creation joyfully.
We will strive for economic justice.
This is what it means to be United Methodist….

It was this vision of “what it means to be United Methodist” that was so consistently in the crosshairs of the right throughout GC. A proposal to add language to the Social Principles that “God’s grace is available to all – nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” passed – but only by 56%, stunning many who understand grace to be absolutely central to a Wesleyan theology. Efforts were made to undermine the guiding authority of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, attempting to supplant “scripture, tradition, experience and reason” with a sole focus on scripture. Guaranteed appointments for clergy, a cornerstone of Methodist itinerancy, was abolished. And restructuring plans for the church took central aim at agencies like the General Commission on Race and Religion and the Committee on the Status and Role of Women. Proposals to withdraw from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which the UMC helped found, and to even further restrict ministry to LGBT people, were passed out of committee.

When the Westboro Baptist Church (of “God hates fags” fame) showed up on the last day of General Conference to protest, many responded with observations like “not sure what’s left to protest.” One widely retweeted comment said, “Fred Phelps is outside for a reason: our theological violence has drawn him like blood draws a shark. We called and he came.”

In the end, it was largely a courageous act of direct action taken by LGBT activists on the conference floor on the penultimate day that kept much additional harm from being done. They occupied the floor and forced the conference to adjourn. As the hall emptied and the lights were turned out on the activists, they kept singing. In fact, they sang “What does the Lord require of you?” non-stop for almost three hours. They agreed to leave and let business resume only after conference leaders promised that they would not allow further harm to be done – in the form of allowing the remaining legislative proposals on sexuality, including the reproductive rights and LGBT items – to be debated and voted on. They enforced that agreement by letting conference leaders know that if any of these proposals did come up, they would immediately reoccupy the floor and prevent further business – further harm – from happening.

The direct action was criticized by some, who said things like LGBT people should “think about some other ways their witness could be made.” But these criticisms call to mind Martin Luther King’s famous words of frustration with “the white moderate,” who he observed “is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.”

Bishop Talbert was right: “The time for talking is over. It is action time.”

LGBT people were called drug addicts, prostitutes and alcoholics. They/we were accused of practicing bestiality. They/we were denounced as evil. All that during a time ironically called “holy conferencing,” a time during General Conference set aside for dialogue on issues of human sexuality on April 25. The following day, Mark Miller, an openly gay man and the best known music director in the UMC, stood on the floor of General Conference and asked for a point of personal privilege. He went on to name what had happened the day before: “We were bullied emotionally, spiritually and physically, and it didn’t seem like anyone did anything. We abide by Wesley’s rule of ‘do no harm,’ and we feel the rule is broken.” Miller asked other LGBT delegates to stand with him, and was then cut off and ruled out of order. But the witness continued after the evening session, when hundreds of people stood in silent protest outside the plenary meeting space.

Meanwhile, legislative proposals to remove the Incompatibility Clause, end the bans on ordaining gays and lesbians and same-sex marriage all failed in committee.

Week one of General Conference had a distinctly Good Friday feel to it.

But we are an Easter people, we believe that in God all things are possible. Week two at General Conference will bring efforts to revisit the prejudiced and discriminatory language of the Book of Discipline in plenary sessions and, regardless of the outcome, the witness of the loving, radically inclusive Gospel will continue to be made in the face of hate, fear and institutional exclusion. There is life, integrity, even justice in the midst of injustice because we live it.

MIND has tried for several years to change this and to get some recognition of LGBT people and NYAC’s commitment to LGBT justice included somewhere, anywhere in the four days of proceedings. Our efforts – private and official letters, emails, meetings with conference leaders and even a public plea directly to the bishop – have been met with further silence. [UPDATE: This year, given what happened at General Conference, such continued silence is utterly unconscionable.]

This year we are calling on you to help us break this deafening silence. If you yourself in any official capacity will be speaking at annual conference, please include LGBT people in your recognition of the diversity of our conference. If appropriate to the nature of your presentation, please mention the conference’s welcome of LGBT people and its longstanding disagreement with the UMC’s unwelcome of them. And regardless of whether you will be on the annual conference stage yourself, engage church leaders you know directly and personally in conversation about the importance of breaking the silence.

The legal basis of the case, filed under the Alien Tort Statute, is the claim that Lively’s anti-gay activism constitutes persecution as defined under international law. Christian persecution, of course, has a long and bloody history but it is shocking nonetheless. Conservative Christian leaders from our country have in fact been involved in a systematic effort to foment anti-gay hatred in African countries for at least a decade, an effort that is documented in the 2009 report Globalizing the Culture Wars: Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia. Part of this effort is linked to the manipulation of African delegates to international church bodies – including our own General Conference – to gain support for the U.S. conservatives’ agenda. The Institute on Religion and Democracy, well-known to many of us for its ongoing interference in UMC politics, has been a key player in this persecution.

Founded in 1968, BMCR was formed in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement after the 30-year struggle to end the segregation of the Central Jurisdiction in the Methodist Church. It is committed to supporting and strengthening Black churches, developing spiritual and prophetic leaders and exposing and combatting latent and overt forms of racism within the church.

NFAAUM advocates for the interests, representation and participation of Asians within the church. It includes 10 sub-caucuses representing Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Formosan, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, South Asian and Vietnamese United Methodists.

The Common Witness Coalition also includes the Reconciling Ministries Network, the Methodist Federation for Social Action and Affirmation. Its vision and agenda for General Conference is embodied in a broad platform of social justice and transformation. The work to end the UMC’s official homophobia is the part of that agenda most familiar to MIND members, for obvious reasons, but the coalition’s foundational statement lays out a broad vision and call to action for racial justice, economic justice and ecological justice along with the call to end anti-LGBT discrimination. The broadening of the coalition to include two of the UMC’s most important ethnic causes strengthens both the movement for racial justice and LGBT justice as it roots us all in the radically inclusive Gospel.

Valentine believed in the freedom to marry and lived into that belief despite the risk. His life is testament to the tradition and obligation of the church to oppose unjust laws.

The thing with history is the more you dig, the more you find, and the evolution of Valentine’s Day is rich, and it has roots in Roman customs that started long before Father Valentine was born.

The annual festival Lupercalia, celebrated on February 15, was a purification and fertility ritual invoking the god Lupercus, protector of flocks. Two naked boys would sacrifice a dog and a goat, and a Luperci priest would mark their foreheads with blood. This was quickly wiped away with a swath of wool dipped in milk. The boys were then clothed in loincloths made from the goat hide, and strips of hide were cut into lashes. They boys led the priests in a raucous and festive procession around the city’s border, chasing maidens and playfully whipping them with the goat hide. It was thought that this flogging ensured fertility and purity, and young women often vied with one another to receive the strokes, much like single women sometimes elbow each other to catch the bride’s bouquet, foretelling marriage in the coming year.  These goat hide lashes were called februra, from which we get the name February.  Lupercalia was a central holiday in the Roman calendar and Roman life.  Soldiers took their customs and traditions with them to Britain and France, including the practice of placing girls’ names in a box and drawing a lover for the length of the festival.

With Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 CE, Christianity became the official religion and Christian authorities attempted to eliminate the rites and rituals of the pagan religion. They found it impossible, however, to prevent the festival of Lupercalia. Their only alternative was to co-opt the holiday and insert customs and rituals more in keeping with prevailing Christian practices. In 496 AD Pope Gelasius named the martyred Valentine the patron saint of lovers, replaced the girls’ names in the lottery boxes with the names of saints to be emulated for the coming year, and declared February 14 Valentine’s Day. We have a 5^th century pope to thank for a holiday celebrating the refusal of one priest to obey the laws of the time.

So there you have it; behind the flowers and chocolates and the shiny red hearts are forbidden marriages, naked boys, and a month named after S/M gear. Happy Valentine’s Day!

--Researched and written by Carol Scott, February 2010

It turns out that inclusiveness is attractive and helps churches grow. Prejudice and discrimination, not so much. That’s the lesson learned by one congregation in Ohio, reported in the news last week, which began welcoming LGBT people in 1998 and more than doubled its weekly attendance. Reconciling churches in our own conference, which make their welcome to LGBT people explicit, have also gained members as a direct result. And the excitement and renewed energy that the We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality initiative has generated are further revitalizing the church, attracting new attention and new members from LGBT communities.

It’s a lesson the UMC seems hellbent on not learning. The church lurches from one desperate program to another to stem the decades-long loss of members, but nowhere in its marketing strategies does it occur to anyone to examine the effect of official prejudice and codified discrimination on its attractiveness to newcomers. Rethink Church offers “Five tips for welcoming visitors,” but having a welcoming theology is not among them. And while they provide “free marketing kits,” apparently no one told them that marketing a defective product doesn’t work. Study after study has documented that the unchurched, particularly young people, are turned off by the hypocrisy and homophobia of anti-gay rules, but these findings are excluded from the marketing advice. The most recent effort, Vital Congregations, delves into the world of so-called “accountability,” requiring congregations to report on supposed measures of inviting and successful churches, but once again refuses to look at how uninviting institutionalized bigotry is.

Perhaps one day UMC officialdom will look the energy, vitality and relevance of the Reconciling movement and conclude that exclusion of God’s LGBT people is not only bad theology, but also bad marketing. Until then, the church seems destined to become “an irrelevant social club,” in the words of Martin Luther King. And in the meantime, MINDful Methodists will simply BE the inclusive church, no matter what the institution says.