Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [109]
Any discussion on gay youth cannot be closed without reviewing briefly the situation in the churches. The question of homosexuality and the church of course goes beyond young people, but the outcome of the internal discourse now under way will profoundly affect younger generations to come. Most Christian denominations today are in the middle of a divisive—even monumental—debate over homosexuality, one that threatens the very cohesion of some of those institutions.
“This is not just another moral issue; this is the issue on which we defend or abandon the authority of the Bible,” the Rev. David Seamands told the Detroit Free Press. Seamands, a retired pastor from Kentucky, was leading the fight to retain condemnation of gay sex within the 8.8-million-member United Church of Christ. Episcopal presiding bishop Edmond Lee Browning told the same paper that the issue of homosexuality is “tremendously explosive. It has the possibility of splitting our church.” Browning was forced to close the public sessions of his church’s national assembly when shouting matches over this issue disrupted the proceedings. Some traditionalist congregations have been discussing leaving the denomination.
This extraordinary debate reverberates in every denomination. The United Methodists voted in 1992 to retain their proscriptions against homosexuality, and tackled the issue again in 1996.
When the Presbyterian General Assembly voted 534 to 81 in 1991 to reject its own internally generated two-hundred-page report recommending softening the church’s stance on gays, hundreds of Presbyterian protesters emerged from the crowd carrying an enormous wooden cross. They silently carried it to the center of the hall and hammered long steel spikes into the wood. Many in the audience wept. (It was a church of this denomination that Bobby Griffith attended!) Yet change is afoot. More than fifty Presbyterian churches across the country have declared themselves “More Light” churches, defining themselves as hospitable to gays. Another eighty list themselves as “inquiring churches,” and many are committing ecclesiastic disobedience: a Eugene, Oregon, church recently ordained a gay and a lesbian as deacons.
The controversy in the church is a reflection of broad changes in the greater society. Urban churches are discovering large numbers of lesbians and gays in their midst as these people come out of the closet in today’s more tolerant climate. Many demand greater acceptance, with the support of liberal-minded straight congregants. These are churches permanently touched by the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and other social currents. By necessity attuned to the pulse of change, they form the nucleus of the reform movement that has shaken old-guard traditionalists to their roots.
The struggle ostensibly revolves around varying interpretations of fewer than a dozen of the Bible’s thirty-one thousand verses. At a deeper level, some argue, run currents of sexual phobia endemic to American culture. “Most devout, heterosexual church people are surprised, confused, arid overpowered by their own sexuality, which they tend to see as dirty, as sin,” wrote Duke Robinson, the liberal pastor of a Presbyterian church in Oakland, California. “While they regularly feel guilty about and confess to God their sexual thoughts…they ignore and refuse to confess as sin their hatred and demeaning treatment of homosexuals.”
Mitzi Henderson, the mother of a gay son and the current president of national P-FLAG, has a family history deeply embedded in the life of the Presbyterian Church. Now a force for reform in the denomination, she was one of the earliest women elders,