Some Religious People Making Their Presence Known at pro Gay Rights Events
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Big GLBT pride events like the parade and festival happening in D.C. this weekend have been going on for so long and are so ubiquitous, they can seem barely newsworthy. Except for the fact of one growing segment: the religious.
We can’t mistake the religious gays which Im not sure how much of a role they play in showing the robes and white collars. It is also important to notice that a lot of these religious people many of whom are gay them selves have been with us since the AIDS first knocked on our doors. But one has to notice that there is some type of change going on with some religious people.
Churches, synagogues and other faith-based groups are stepping up their outreach to gays and lesbians, part of a general opening of doors that have been firmly shut, including in the U.S. military (which dropped “don’t ask don’t tell” in late 2011) andthe Boy Scouts of America (which dropped its ban on openly gay boys last month).
Organizers of this weekend’s Capital Pride named 14 faith-based groups participating in Sunday’s festival for the first time. They include Baptist, Lutheran and Quaker churches as well as the country’s largest Buddhist denomination, a Conservative synagogue and a Mormon advocacy group.
Perhaps the most prominent first in 2013 will be the participation in Saturday’s parade of Washington National Cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Church and the site of many presidential funerals and major national interfaith gatherings. The Episcopal Church, a small but prominent Protestant denomination, has been generally in favor of gay equality for years but the Cathedral leadership has been raising the bar in the last few months.
This is the initiative of its new dean, Gary Hall, a well-known and outspoken advocate for gay equality who made national news last year when he announced the Cathedral would begin hosting same-sex weddings in its dramatic nave. Last month he hosted the first reception ever in the elegant official-dean digs for the LGBT community, an event attended by nearly 100 advocates and their allies.
His speech there echoes what you often hear from faith groups making a new push: We want to reclaim the mantle of what is truly Godlike.
“Sadly, as many of you no doubt know first-hand, much of the homophobia that exists in our culture is a result of so-called religious teachings, and what certain denominations have been preaching for decades in the name of Christianity,” Hall told the crowd. “I refuse to believe that anyone who has read the whole Bible can miss its message of love and compassion for all of God’s children.”
GLBT advocates also want to take the momentum that exists in the United States and carry it overseas, where doctrines of various religions, including Islam and Christianity, are cited for laws in some countries making it illegal to be gay.
This outreach isn’t monolithic, nor strictly liberal. In approving the end of a Boy Scout ban on open homosexuality, leaders from both the Catholic and Mormon Churchesnoted their desire to evangelize more to gays and lesbians.
How will gay people respond to this outreach?
Several people I know who engage in this kind of outreach say it’s met with powerful reactions. I met a few young men recently who are devout members of a Dupont Circle area church and who work a booth at the Pride festival each year for the congregation. They told me festival-goers are still very moved by seeing houses of worship coming to the gay community. Touched, but also sometimes wary.
“For many it was the club they could never go to,” said Jeff Wells, who works a booth for All Soul’s Episcopal and is gay. “We get a lot of: ‘Wow, you’re here!’ They may come from a part of the country where this would never happen.”
Wells has been going to Pride events in Washington since the mid-1980s.
“In the past it wasn’t the denomination or the congregation, it was some small group [of that faith] saying: ‘Don’t be so closed!’” Wells said. “Now you’ve got the bishop, the head of the Reform [Jewish] congregation, the whomever marching there with them. Now it’s not the agitators trying to change from the far outer edge. Now you have the head of the institution there.” (Michelle Boorstein)
Still what you don’t see there are the hardcore doom and gloom Pentecostals which associate them selves with some of the Southern Baptist and any other religious organizations that believe that the world is coming to an end and Jesus Christ is doing an encore trip; But this time to take his church to the clouds to the wedding with the church and leave the rest of us sinners behind to suffer 100 years of the ruling someone of someone similar to President Bush-Nixon to rule with the help of the beast which some believe is Mr.Pope.
We also don’t see the NY Catholics of the Archbishop Dolan crowd or any of the more hardcore that even some people don’t hear about them, they are very big in numbers, they just stay a bit behind because they are compose of the very poor which don’t have the money to be traveling for any reason and the ones that belong to the super churches. Those are going to go accordingly to where the winds are blowing because if you see what the pastors are driving, you know what drive them and they are not going to do anything to disturb the cash flow from to their memberships and donations.
Interesting to see more of the religious no matter who they are but is also a good idea to think we got this people with us when in fact this is the core of the lying and spreading of malicious rumors about gays as pointed above.
{Adam}
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