"Sexually Inclusive Christians" Celebrate Victories, Push for More

When arguing for church acceptance of homosexuality, most advocates talk about monogamy. But others are bolder.

“I am a strong ally of those in healthy, polyamorous relationships,” declared Debra Kolodny. She argued that having multiple sexual partners can be “holy.” Kolodyn was leading a workshop at the WOW (Witness Our Welcome) 2003 convention, an ecumenical gathering for “sexually and gender inclusive Christians.”

Hundreds of homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual people gathered under the “queer” banner in Philadelphia August 14-17 to urge religious acceptance of non-traditional sexual behaviors.

According to WOW’s schedule brochure, it was sponsored by the homosexual caucus groups in most mainline Protestant denominations and Dignity USA (for Roman Catholics). Other supporting groups listed in the program included People for the American Way, the Human Rights Campaign, McCormick Theological Seminary (Presbyterian), Episcopal Divinity School, Chicago Theological Seminary (United Church of Christ), and Wesley Theological Seminary (United Methodist).

According to the president of Wesley seminary, Wesley paid a fee for a table with promotional material at WOW 2003. But Wesley did not endorse or give financial support to WOW beyond this fee.

Kolodny, an author and former national coordinator for The National Bisexual Network, was leading a workshop called “Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith.” Although focusing mostly on bisexuality, Kolodny, who is Jewish, explained that she could not conclude the session without discussing polyamory.

“There can be fidelity in threesomes,” Kolodny said. “It can be just as sanctified as anything else if all parties are agreed.” But she was careful to stress that polyamory is unacceptable “if there is deceit.”

Kolodny said polyamory does not usually involve simultaneous group sex. But there are exceptions, she admitted, as she recalled a friend of hers who shares a bed with his wife and male partner. When asked by a workshop participant how polyamory was different from “recreational sex,” Kolodny responded that consensual recreational sex could be a part of polyamory. But polyamory usually involves some level of commitment and intimacy.

Noting she herself had never been polyamorous, Kolodny explained that as a busy attorney she simply did not have time to conduct the complicated “negotiations” necessary for “holy” polyamory. But she expressed admiration for persons with the time to organize.

Most of Kolodny’s talk was about bisexuality, not polyamory. “I disagree with the queer movement [when it claims] that sexual orientation is predetermined,” Kolodny said, asserting that the existence of bisexuality “challenges all that.”

“I know a lot of women who chose to become lesbian,” Kolodny said. “Love between two people is always beautiful,” she added, and should be regarded as part of free choice.

“I’m not sure we can make the case for genetic predetermination,” Kolodny stressed, saying sexual preference depends on opportunity, support, and spiritual experiences.

Kolodny lamented that the “queer” movement insists on the “party line” of genetic predetermination as part of a “political strategy.”

“The queer movement relies on, ‘We can’t help it. We’re born this way,’ Kolodny said. “It feels so safe. If you don’t say it you’re thrown to the lions and you’re evil.”

She contrasted the insistence on genetic predetermination with the teachings of Judaism and Christianity, which say: “God gives us choices.”

“Free will is essential to our humanity and essential to our being created in the image of God,” Kolodny said. She charged that denying free choice in sex preference was “perpetuating the hetero-patriarchy,” helping the “radical right,” ignoring bisexuality, and making it easier for “hate” to continue.

Rather than creating “absolute poles” of sexual preference, Kolodny said the world includes a wide spectrum of choices. She recalled the hostility of her “dyke” friends when she abandoned her strict lesbianism for bisexuality. Many homosexuals suspect bisexuals of trying to gain the “privileges” of the hetero-patriarchy by seeking sexual partners of the opposite gender.

Another workshop leader who addressed a sexual minority sometimes forgotten by the “queer” movement was the Rev. Erin Swenson, formerly Eric. Swenson is a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister and family counselor whose sex change operation made Swenson the first post-operative transsexual minister in a major denomination.

Swenson was married with children. But after suffering for years from a desire to be a woman, Swenson finally divorced and had the operation. “I don’t recommend that any one become transgender,” Swenson said. “It’s a very painful process.”

“Some people accuse me of not being a woman,” Swenson complained, citing “ultra-feminists.” Swenson prefers being called simply “Erin and a child of God” to any label. “High heels are very uncomfortable,” Swenson playfully admitted.

“Transgender people won’t come to your church unless they truly know they are safe there,” Swenson warned. Even ostensibly “gay” friendly congregations are sometimes not prepared for transgender people. “Get your church to be trans friendly,” Swenson urged. One need is for bathrooms not marked male or female.

Swenson described the United Church of Christ as “miles ahead of anybody” in making itself open to transgender people. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in contrast, declined Swenson’s offer to volunteer in the creation of church resource materials for transgender church members.

“Transgendered people threaten communities because they threaten our assumptions,” Swenson concluded. “It is threatening but also freeing.”

Leading a workshop on “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Issues in the Roman Catholic Church,” Mary Louise Cervone complained that tolerance rather than justice” is the norm in America today. A former president of Dignity USA, Cervone, with her same-sex partner at her side, wondered how many “nameless men and women” must die before this country moves beyond tolerance to freedom for all people.

“Our best hope for change rests not with bishops and the pope but with Catholic people,” Cervone insisted. “Change won’t come form the top down. The Catholic people must demand freedom.

Cervone affirmed her lesbianism as a “gift of God.” She confessed she has a hard time attending the Catholic Church, because the “church is not where we find freedom. It’s where we go to hide.”

“But you can’t kick me out,” Cervone declared defiantly. “Where in religion did we get the idea that some people are more worthy than others?” she wondered.

The Rev. Jorge Lockwood, who is Global Praise Coordinator for the United Methodist Church’s Board of Global Ministries, led a workshop called “Redeeming Our Bodies, Congregational Song as a Path of Liberation.”

“As queer people, we have another way of looking at the body,” Lockwood said. He complained that churches too often are uncomfortable with the human body and suffer from “liturgical constipation.” He observed that too often people think the “desire of a 25 year old gay man for another 25 year old man is a beautiful thing,” but the desire of a 65 year old for a 25 year is “dirty.”

“We have all learned to challenge Romans,” said the Rev. Mari Castellanos, referring to St. Paul’s letter that, among other Scriptures, is critical of homosexual behavior. Castellanos leads the Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ. “We must do likewise with all texts that go against our brothers and sisters that are being claimed as the unerring Word of God.”

But Castellanos also urged the WOW 2003 audience to embrace “justice” issues beyond their own. “When we leave this earth, queer bishops won’t matter as much as whether the hungry are fed,” she insisted, to applause.

“This president and this Congress have systematically torn down the social net that sustained all of us,” Castellanos mourned. “We must lobby our government on behalf of the poor of the world. Our experience of exile has taught us compassion.”

Castellanos promised that “we will take on scary proposals such as the Marriage Protection Act. We will turn the tide that threatens to obliterate the social contract.” Echoing the name of a radical homosexual group, she insisted: “We must continue to act-up!”

Rev. Yvette Flunder, a United Church of Christ pastor from San Francisco, celebrated a string of political victories for pro-homosexuality advocates, including the election of an Episcopal Church homosexual bishop, the arrival of legalized same-sex unions in Canada, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against anti-sodomy laws.

“The Holy Ghost can break loose in an atmosphere of injustice and give us more justice in three weeks than many years!” Flunder enthused. “These wouldn’t have been miracles under Bill Clinton!” she exclaimed, citing the irony of pro-homosexuality strides under a conservative government.

The Rev. Troy Perry, founder of the predominantly homosexual Metropolitan Community Churches, asked all the heterosexuals at WOW 2003 to stand and receive applause. “Thank you!!... I know what people do to you,” he told them, saying they pay a price for solidarity with homosexuals.

Perry said he “just got married” to his male partner of 18 years, who has had AIDS for several years. He likened the plight of homosexuals who cannot legally marry to slaves who also had no legal right to marriage.

“I will not give up until every one of us can marry,” Perry insisted, comparing Heaven to attending the WOW 2003 conference.

A brief skit produced for the WOW 2003 audience showed three troubled disciples in a storm-tossed boat. One, a young woman, declares: “I am bisexual and can’t find acceptance in the gay community.” A man says, “I am a 19 year old gay. Or am I queer? And I’m Presbyterian. But I’m not sure what that means!” A third person complains she is age 22 but cannot “find a voice” in the gay community.

Then a figure representing Jesus appears, played by a young woman wrapped in the rainbow flag, which is the emblem of the homosexual movement. “Take heart, it is I,” she says. “Do not be afraid.”

Do a quick study on Paganism In Post-Moral America

POST-MORAL AMERICA
the union of paganism and technology

Dorothy Anne Seese

Nothing short of national revival can save America from itself, its lusts, greed, worship of technology and exaltation of all that is pagan and degrading to the individual human being.

A nation has fallen flat on its face and barely anyone among the general public sees the extent of the evil (beyond the local convenience store robberies or driveby shootings) to the root causes of America's rush of the lemmings toward the precipice.

The national motto may still be "In God We Trust" but the majority of Americans and others living here, legally or illegally, have their own gods, baals, idols, gargoyles and pagan shrines of moral debauchery.

Humans are social beings, and for millennia the basic structure of society was the family, the basic moral unit was the integrity of the individual. People need to belong, and until the 1970's era, people belonged to the family unit. Now they either don't belong anywhere, or the government assigns them as children to some "unit" under their supervision. Rugged individualism was once an admirable trait instilled into children from generation to generation, the true legacy of the family and the culture of character. Any individualism is now brought under control by the federalized school system in favor of the collective class.

We have government-mandated or government-sanctioned groupthink coming out of institutions of higher idiocy like Berkeley (which has been a blight on the educational scene for at least six decades). The purpose is to make the state and technology the relative moral compass and the family's moral influence irrelevant. They have been very successful at what they are doing. The same is true of most of our institutions of higher learning, Berkeley just happened to be a leader in this movement and a continuing fountainhead of mental and moral poisoning from academia.

We have a federal republic, but our elected representatives have failed to represent us, the citizens, and have represented either their own interests or that of the collectivist state and statism, demonstrating total contempt for their office and their constituents. Rather than leading toward a higher pinnacle of moral excellence, our representatives in many if not most instances revel in their own debauchery and attempt to persuade the people of their districts or states that any deviant behaviors are "only about sex."

Lack of character in one area makes anyone highly suspect of possessing a faulty moral compass in other areas of their life and thought.

In the march toward one world governance, one world religion and one global federation of peoples, all the old boundaries are being tossed out like used Kleenex.

Individual morality has at its foundation a belief system that our once Christian-oriented nation will no longer tolerate. Hence the nativity scene has nearly been obliterated from all public exhibitions at Christmas, replaced totally by Santa and anything non-Christian that people want to toss into the tinseltown, commercialized displays.

Quantity is the object, quality has only a relative, changing meaning, and virtue is ridiculed.

A nation such as this, that has fallen so far into the worship of itself, the exaltation of man's elitist rule and the denigration of the Creator is in for a hard, fast fall right off the precipice of national extinction. Oaths of office have become meaningless rituals or recitations; vows and covenants are made to be broken; the home is the roof over one's head and not the residence of the heart's affections. This type of social "order" is nothing but disorder under government supervision enforced by irrational laws to ensure its implementation.

We were once concerned about invasion of privacy, and now we face the impending invasion of our bodies by foreign objects ranging from government-wielded vaccination needles to mandatory implanted tracking devices.

We elected representatives and leaders, but after they were elected, we discovered that they were agents of the collectivist state or emissaries of tyranny. Our judiciary has become complicit by upholding all that is ungodly and anti-individualistic while condoning, upholding and even wresting the Constitution and Bill of Rights to accommodate the statist agenda.

The government now owns the land, is buying up the water, controlling the means of food production, engaging in "rural cleansing" to get individualists off privately owned land, protecting fish that can be purchased in cans at the local grocery store, protecting bugs that would be more useful if exterminated and a selection of birds that few have ever seen or care to see. Loggers are out of work while forests burn. Environmentalists are still pushing their "global warming" efforts in spite of the fact that the polar ice caps on Mars are melting under the heat of the sun without human intervention.

Moral compass? In a world of crackpots with leaders who worship themselves, theatrical stars who look like refugees from an insane ward or a cheap brothel, and kids dressed in gangsta clothes that express their attitude with chains and tongue piercings? Not for those groups.

Moral compass? When we tossed God out of our nation and our schools, our courts and public buildings, we threw the compass overboard.

Now ... we didn't have today's technology fifty or sixty years ago ... but were we a freer people with more individual freedom and respect for life, liberty and individual rights? Did "home" still have real meaning? Were children the property of their parents til age of majority rather than the state? Did we have meaning to being an "American" other than coming here to milk the cash cow?

We're in post-moral America ... one that can't last long without a national revival that will return to us, as a people, our moral compass. Absent that, the next generations will simply be cloned monsters that will bring down on us and our world not only a hybrid race of humanoid things, but the wrath of Almighty God (not Allah), which wrath we will have earned to the fullest extent of the judgment executed.

And justice it will be.

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