[News] [MI, USA] As anti-discrimination vote nears, a surprise from Kalamazoo clergy
Stephanie Stevens
As anti-discrimination vote nears, a surprise from Kalamazoo clergy
By David Alire Garcia
10/21/09 3:04 PM
KALAMAZOO — When local residents were in the early stages of debating
a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance last year, Rev. Douglas
Vernon’s <http://www.umc-kzo.org/pastors.asp> flock was debating a
more fundamental question.
Vernon, the senior pastor of First United Methodist Church of
Kalamazoo <http://www.umc-kzo.org/> , explained in a recent interview
how his congregation had engaged in two and a half years of prayer and
deep reflection on the Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline
<http://www.cokesbury.com/forms/ProductDetail.aspx?pid=0687023734> and
that text’s teaching on homosexuality:
Homosexuals, no less than heterosexuals, are persons of sacred
worth, but their lifestyle goes against Christian teaching.
The 40-year-veteran of the Methodist clergy recites the line by
memory. And he then explains how his downtown Kalamazoo church went on
to commit an act of denominational defiance.
“Our congregation became a reconciling congregation,” Vernon said
proudly. “We chose to welcome all persons and we’ve developed a
welcoming statement,” he said, noting that statement specifically
welcomes all regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
“For our congregation to take that decision was a rather momentous step.”
Vernon’s congregation is one of only a handful of local churches that
have embraced the proposed Ordinance 1856, an initiative on
Kalamazoo’s Nov. 3 ballot that seeks to prohibit discrimination on the
basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. That makes his
Methodist church a surprising exception to the often predictable rule
of religious divisions over such proposals: liberal denominations and
churches supporting them, conservative ones against.
It may also offer a clue into how even hardened religious positions
may be softening in Kalamazoo’s current debate over gay rights.
[Photo: Pastor Timothy Ezell of Mt. Calvary Christian Bible Church in Kalamazoo]
Rev. Timothy Ezell’s stance on Ordinance 1856, meanwhile, is anything
but soft. The pastor of Mt. Calvary Christian Bible Church recently
delivered a seven-minute statement expanding on his view that the
proposed ordinance is “discriminatory and intolerable.” The statement
by Ezell, a member of the advisory committee of Kalamazoo Citizens
Voting No to Special Rights Discrimination
<http://responsiblevoters.org/Home.aspx> , the group opposing the
ordinance, is prominently featured on the group’s otherwise bare-bones
Web site.
“Someone’s choice of sexual behavior or a man wearing women’s clothing
and demanding the right to use the women’s restroom, is not the moral
or social or legal equivalency of being born with black skin,” Ezell
said while discussing how the ordinance should not be thought of as an
extension of any civil rights struggle. The African-American pastor of
the past 23-years at Mt. Calvary then goes on to argue that the
ordinance amounts to “government sponsored discrimination” and a
“solution in search of a non-existing problem.”
Contacted by Michigan Messenger, Ezell criticized the television ad
produced by One Kalamazoo, the group supporting Ordinance 1856. “The
other side has not been truthful.”
Gay couples with or without children should not be described as
“families,” he said, faulting the 30-second commercial for featuring
at least one heterosexual family — father, mother, two adorable
infants — but no one who’s obviously gay.
“That’s very deceptive,” he added, “to say family, and you’re a
homosexual gay person and you’re promoting the traditional family of a
man, woman and children. Saying ‘family,’ that does not fit.”
[Photo: Pastor Matthew Laney of First Congregational Church in
Kalamazoo (Photo by David Alire Garcia/Michigan Messenger)]
Another local minister whose views also don’t fit into the soft
category is Rev. Matthew Laney <http://www.kazoofcc.org/staff.asp> of
First Congregational Church <http://www.kazoofcc.org/> , located on
the other side of Kalamazoo’s Bronson Park from Vernon’s Methodist
church.
“This is going to sound sort of haughty,” the United Church of Christ
minister said with a laugh sitting in his book-filled office, “but
we’re kind of past this.” Of the UCC, he added: “We’ve historically
been on the forefront of important social justice issues.” Laney
proudly recounted just a couple of the UCC’s litany of “firsts” — the
first Christian denomination to ordain women and openly gay ministers.
Laney, married and in the third year of serving his downtown
congregation, is one of only two clergy on the One Kalamazoo steering
committee <http://www.onekalamazoo.com/news/7-one-kalamazoo-announces-steering-committee>
. The opposing group lists seven ministers
<http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/09/campaign_group_citizens_voting.html>
on its advisory committee.
“For me it’s very easy to be very public about who we are and how we
express our faith particularly around inclusion of GLBT people because
it’s just part of who we are as a denomination,” Laney said. He
estimates that anywhere between 5 to 10 percent of his congregation is
gay or lesbian. And that, he adds, has “been a blessing to us and
helped us really live out why we feel the gospel is true.”
Ezell’s truth, on the other hand, is that passage of Ordinance 1856
will specifically harm women due to their possible proximity to
transgender women in public bathrooms. In his statement, he spelled
out that harm in the form of a question.
Should our mothers and wives and children be forced, by law … to
share the woman’s restroom or showers, or locker rooms or changing
rooms, with men who have their emotional and mental delusions that
they are women [and] wear women’s clothing?
That, Ezell, believes violates “the privacy, comfort and sense of
security of women and children in restrooms and other public
facilities.”
Laney, like many in Kalamazoo these days, has heard that line of
attack from opponents of the anti-discrimination ordinance many times
now. But he doesn’t buy it.
“They’re really seizing on fear mongering, in my opinion, about what
is going to happen to your daughter in the bathroom,” he says. “It’s
ludicrous. But that’s where they’re going, which says something about
what they have to stand on, which isn’t a whole lot.”
Vernon, the Methodist, is focusing less on the current campaign and
more on his four decades of ministry, specifically the GLBT
congregants he’s come to know over the last 20 years or so. He said
he’s been particularly affected by the coming-out stories they’ve
shared with him and at least one recurring detail.
“In every case, when they came out to me they told me this was not a
choice, this is something they were born with — and I completely
believe that,” he said. “The scriptures proclaim that we are
mysteriously and wonderfully made. That’s true of all of us.”
At the heart of the religious divide, Vernon said, is a clash over
biblical interpretation. But the concept of God religious people
embrace is even more important, he believes.
“For me, it’s irrational to believe that God would create GLBT persons
for loveless lives. That they would somehow be condemned to never be
in relationships, never express their love to another person,” he
said.
Vernon asked his own question: “Is our God loving and just and merciful or not?”
© 2009 The Michigan Messenger