LGBT Activists Fighting the Last Battles of the Culture Wars

By Anja Tranovich, AlterNet. Posted June 24, 2008.

As wedding halls in New York and California frantically stock up on rainbow-colored confetti and gender-neutral programs, it's easy for coastal liberals to assume the culture wars are over. Not quite -- and if religious conservatives have anything to do with it, expect the last battles to be messy.

A majority of Americans still oppose same-sex marriage. Conservative churches, which in many communities operate as arbiters of the traditional family structure, are strong and raging, even as they start to lose some battles -- or perhaps especially as they start to lose some battles. But some gay and lesbian activists are going on the front lines of the culture wars: They're showing up at evangelical churches and confronting homophobia at its source.

About six months ago a coalition of religious LGBT groups contacted megachurches asking for small meetings over shared meals to discuss gay rights. They hoped to speak believer-to-believer, and the participants came in spirit of worship and respect. They picked six of the most influential megachurches to visit and share worship, starting on Mothers' Day and going through Fathers' Day. They dubbed their efforts "The American Family Outing."

On a balmy evening in May, a group of LGBT families in their Sunday best made their third visit to an evangelical church to attend a dinner led by a fervently anti-gay religious leader in Maryland.

Bishop Harry Jackson opened the meeting by asking if these lifelong Christians really knew God. From the pulpit, the former football player claimed that "gay activists have threatened my life." In the discussion that followed, the two sides shared stories and hashed out the tough questions of who was permitted to be a true Christian as what it means to be a gay person.

With his partner Jose Ortiz at his side, Steve Parelli talked about his experience growing up in the evangelical church, attending seminary school and becoming a minister -- only to be shunned by his family when he came out as gay. Many of the other participants in the Family Outing had similar stories of lives dedicated to their families and their churches, only to see it all fall apart when they were open about their sexuality.

As the dinner ended, a debate began. Bishop Harry Jackson mused aloud about peppering his statements with references to biblical passages interpreted to cast gays and lesbians as aberrant sinners. But in case anyone misunderstood the bishop's intent, a tall man in a crew cut from the group Exodus International -- an organization that advertises "freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ -- stood watch over the events from the corner.

Parelli said he went through a similar ex-gay program hoping to subvert his same sex desires,

"I remember waking up one morning with a revelation almost in tears," he said, detailing a period in which he was trying to reconcile his faith and sexuality. "I thought, 'What if they are wrong? What if that isn't what the Bible says?' It seems like such a simple statement, but it was so incredible to me at the time. That's how ingrained this is for the evangelical."

The meeting with Bishop Harry Jackson closed with statements from Troy Sanders, an out gay pastor of preach2me.com. Sanders said his life had been also been threatened because of his sexual orientation and reminded Bishop Jackson and the predominately African-American congregation that white people questioned if blacks could be "true believers" and "really Christian" during and after slavery -- and back then, biblical verses were cited to exclude them from the church, too.

Not much reconciliation was made, or expected, in a conversation book-ended by tales of death threats. But in returning to address the churches that had shunned them, the LGBT families made it clear that they are no longer going to take discrimination in the law or in their houses of worship.

The ground has shifted underneath the evangelical movement. Bishop Jackson's statements about the role of gays and lesbians in the church reflect a new defensive position; popular preachers Jon Hagee and Rod Parsley are demonized as extremists; and Jerry Falwell's death changed the church's old guard.

Bill Carpenter of Soulforce, one of the groups organizing the Family Outing, said that evangelicals see the culture around them changing, but instead of evolving with it, they dig in deeper.

Digging deeper into fundamentalist roots doesn't exactly endear conservative religious communities to gays and lesbians. So if the reaction to a few dozen religious LGBT families traveling to six megachurches wasn't open-armed acceptance or love in the mold of Christ, it was panic.

See more stories tagged with: marriage, lgbt, marriage equality

Anja Tranovich is a freelance journalist and the associate editor of Passport Magazine and InTheFray.org. Her work has appeared in Clamor magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Nation and other newspapers, magazines and newswires.

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