Midlife Meditation

Bishop Karen Oliveto kneels during her consecration at the Western Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church. And some of the Pharisees in the multitude said to [Jesus], “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.”  He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” (Luke 16:39-40) Who knew the last straw would be a study commission? The United Methodist Church has been struggling with sexual diversity in the ministry since 1972. In that year, the General Conference (the quadrennial meeting that decides all matters of polity for the denomination) first amended the Discipline (the denominational rule book) to forbid ordination of "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals." Since then, generations of gay and lesbian candidates for ministry have been forced to remain closeted for their entire careers; to lie to to their congregations, superintendents, and bishops; to carefully avoid using certain terminology with church officials wh...

It's just a piece of paper. That's what we've been telling ourselves for over a year--and really, what I've been telling myself for far longer than that. A marriage license is a document that only has meaning because human beings assign it that meaning. It's the same conceit that causes a more durable slip of paper to be worth whatever dollar amount we assign to it: without the tacit agreement of all the humans who are affected by the existence of this document, it would be nothing more than tinder for a campfire, recyclable material for a pulp mill, lining for a bird cage. I went for fifteen years without having my name on a marriage license, telling myself it was just a piece of paper. Oh, there were times I longed to be part of the legally wed club, especially as I felt my parenting years slipping away from me; but mostly, I comforted myself with the knowledge that the meaning of a marriage license is an arbitrary thing, assigned to it by a culture that fr...

Candidate for ordination Ginny Mikita at the wedding of her friends, Rev. Benjamin and Monty Hutchison, in July. Despite all the smiles in the picture, it was a bittersweet occasion. United Methodist minister Benjamin Hutchison had resigned from his pastorate in order to marry his partner, Monty. I do not know the details of his exit from the ministry, but I expect they went like this: Ben was tired of playing the shell game of having his Staff Parish Committee, district superintendent, and bishop pretend not to know his housemate was also his life partner, parsing his language so as not to say the fatal words which would end his career: I'm gay. This is my lover. We're getting married. At some point, he told the wrong person the truth, and that person, rather than continue to skirt the Book of Discipline, told Ben he had two choices: resign or go on trial. He chose the first option, left his pastorate, and scheduled a wedding. The Hutchisons wanted a Methodist wedding, ...

No, I will not issue you a marriage license. Now leave me alone. Her name is Kim Davis, and what she's doing is seriously messing with my head. As a county clerk, part of her job is issuing marriage licenses to any applicants who meet a short list of requirements: be at least 18, bring your driver's license to apply, swear to not being married to anyone else, and don't be more closely related than second cousins. Being straight is no longer on that list. Kim Davis wishes it still was. She'd really rather not issue marriage licenses to gay couples. I know something about wishes. I wish summer was a week longer. I wish I had a classroom of my own to teach music in. I wish I didn't have to drive 35 minutes to get to work. I wish I could afford to travel more. I wish, I wish, I wish... As the saying goes, "If wishes were fishes, we'd all swim in riches." Since they're not, we don't. (Though given the state of the world's ...

Methodist support for North Carolina's 2012 ballot measure banning recognition of all forms of marriage--including domestic partnerships--other than one man and one woman. There are times I wish I could reverse my baptism. Yesterday I was out running errands in the Tanasbourne district. I was stopped at the traffic signal at Evergreen and 185th when two sign-wavers caught my eye. One was promoting the opening of a new restaurant. The other was promoting Jesus. I couldn't get a good look at the sign--I think it was something about him dying for sinners, evangelical boilerplate--though I did glimpse the words "Grace Bible Church" on the bottom of the sign. Turning onto 185th, I saw two more sign-wavers on the opposite corner. I couldn't make out what one of the signs said, but the other was clearly visible, and worded so effectively I was able to hold the entire text in my memory until I came to a stop light where I could enter it as a note in my phone: ...

A monk, a priest, a rabbi, several ministers, and half a dozen nuns walk into the governor's office... So it's Indiana that takes the ball and runs with it. The Supreme Court opened the door for the  "religious freedom" excuse for state-sanctioned discrimination last summer with the Hobby Lobby decision.  At the time, Court-watching pundits warned that the decision would empower right-wing Christians to write their bigotry into law. Then came the waiting game: which state would be the first to extend a sanctimonious middle finger to the gay community? The answer came this week, as Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a bill giving business owners the right to refuse service to persons who offend their religious sensibilities. If you've followed this blog since its inception two years ago, you know I've had some very harsh things to say about Christianity. I've railed against the institutional cowardice that holds denominations back from impleme...

In Love Is Strange , a movie I'd like to see that opens in a couple of big cities today, but not yet in Portland, a choir director loses his teaching job for getting married. Why would marriage cost him his job? Because he's gay. Wait, how can it be legal for a gay couple to marry, and simultaneously legal to fire a man for being gay? Because he teaches at a Catholic school, and religious institutions are allowed to practice job discrimination based on sexual orientation. Ludicrous, you say? How could this happen in our modern, tolerant world? Ten years ago, it almost happened to me. No, I was not, and am not, gay; nor was I getting married at the time. What I was  doing was signing a petition opposing Oregon's "Defense of Marriage" ballot measure. The faith community I belonged to at the time was affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and took out an ad in the Oregonian  listing the names of every signatory as a demonstration that people of faith wer...

"We are a better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history." --Judge John E. Jones III, in his opinion striking down Pennsylvania's version of the Defense of Marriage Act I started my last post with this quote, but didn't really address it. The occasion of its writing was a cause for great celebration, as marriage equality is now the law of the land in nineteen states. Of the remaining 31, discriminatory marriage legislation has been challenged in court in all but one, and given the perfect victory record of every previous challenge, it is just a matter of time--months, perhaps--until gay and lesbian couples can enter into civilly recognized marriage contracts throughout the United States. (It might take a little longer in North Dakota, the only state without such a lawsuit in progress.) This is, as I just said, cause for celebration. It's been a long time coming, and now it's happening so quickly!...

"We are a better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history." --Judge John E. Jones III, in his opinion striking down Pennsylvania's version of the Defense of Marriage Act. These powerful words sum up a cascade of judicial decisions that will, once they have weathered the inevitable ineffective appeals, make marriage equality the law in more than half the fifty states. They could have been written for the Oregon decision, but it is perhaps more significant, more telling, that they came from the pen of a conservative Republican judge who, at the time of his nomination to the federal bench, was endorsed by Rick Santorum. I learned of the ruling from Facebook, which was flooded with happy posts yesterday afternoon, including several versions of "Now I can finally marry my true love!" Amy, Sarah, and I were headed downtown for a heterosexual wedding celebration at Voicebox, a karaoke bar that was, we disc...

It's a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, Oregon, but my thoughts are elsewhere. The good news is that, in Idaho and Kansas, cooler heads prevailed. That may still happen in Arizona, as well: Gov. Jan Brewer has already vetoed one law like this one. That bit of good news is cold comfort, though, when held up against the fact that people can be elected to a legislative office, take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then with a straight face insist they have a constitutional right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and that to question such discrimination is to deny them free exercise of their religion. That's the essence of all three of these latter-day Jim Crow laws: if my religion teaches that some aspect of your personhood is sinful, I have a right to deny you service at my establishment--even if, in the case of the Idaho bills, that establishment provides vital medical services. You may already have seen the sign posted by Rocco's Pizza ...

Just in case there's any doubt at all about the intent of my last post, the one in which I announced my availability to perform gay weddings: Yes, I know it's against the Discipline (that's the United Methodist Constitution, for you muggles out there); no, I don't wish to do it in secret (no back alley weddings); and yes, I am not only willing, but eager to face whatever penalties may be imposed on me by the church that formed me as a spiritual being, ordained me as first a deacon and then an elder, and ultimately decided it had had enough of me, an antipathy I concluded within a year or two was and is quite mutual. As Robyn Morrison has eloquently detailed in the blog she shares with her husband, Gerry Hill , the covenant United Methodist elders enter into at ordination is fundamentally twisted. To be true to our vows, we elders must espouse and practice doctrines that few of us believe or consistently apply to our own lives. Elders flaunt their creatively adap...

A few days ago, my friend Gerry Hill  did something wonderful. I wrote about Gerry in my last post, describing his sincerity, integrity, and through-and-through Christianity. Right around the same time, Gerry posted on his own blog a decision he had come to: after decades of living with the hypocrisy of United Methodist acceptance/rejection of gay personhood, he was surrendering his orders . This is huge. Becoming an elder of the United Methodist Church is akin to becoming a doctor. It took me ten years from the time I entered seminary until the Bishop finally laid hands on me, and considering I only stayed in ministry another four and a half years after that, that's not great value for preparation. Most elders, once they get to that point, stay with the profession a good deal longer than I did. Ordination is not just licensure; it's vocation, and even more than that, it's identity. There are some elders who embody their ordination so deeply that, even if they keep it...

 A gay wedding presided over by a United Methodist Bishop? Can it be? Are the progressive leaders of the church finally putting their money where there mouths are, stepping up to the plate, diving into the deep end? Well--not quite. The symbolism of this wedding was significant. There have been same-gender weddings performed by Methodist clergy for decades. Some have even been out in the open, and have resulted in the pastors who presided over them being put on trial by the church. This is the first to be performed by a Bishop, who did so over the objection of the actual Bishop in charge of the Conference where the wedding took place. So it appears that Bishop Melvin Talbert was putting his career on the line, risking the highest-profile discipline yet meted out by the denomination, a church trial that could bust this issue wide open. Except for one thing: Bishop Talbert is retired. Which means there's little of real significance being put at risk. Bishop Talbert will no...