The Bay Citizen

Straight couples dressed in tuxedoes and pastel-colored gowns were forced to wait in a hallway outside the San Francisco recorder’s office on Tuesday as 10 Bay Area Christian leaders sat in a circle inside singing “We Shall Overcome,” “Chapel of Love,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” It has become an annual Valentine’s Day protest of the city’s inability to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples, an authority that is on hold until appeals of a court’s decision to strike down California’s gay marriage ban are exhausted.

“We’re just going to keep knocking at the door until justice is available to all people,” the Rev. Karen Oliveto, a Methodist pastor of San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, said after sheriff’s deputies handcuffed her and her fellow protesters and led them to jail.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit earlier this month upheld a decision declaring Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, unconstitutional. The ruling represented a milestone in the secular struggle over gay rights. In the shadow of that struggle, however, a quieter battle is being waged within churches over whether gay people can be married and ordained.

Long before the issue of same-sex marriage grabbed the spotlight, liberal Protestant pastors in Northern California were fighting against church rules prohibiting ordination and marriage of homosexuals. That internal church struggle is broadening nationwide.

In recent years, mainline Protestant denominations — which are different from evangelical Christian churches that read the Bible as literal truth and emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus — have one by one changed rules that had prohibited marriage and ordination of gays and lesbians. The Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church U.S.A., Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Church of Christ at one time all barred same-sex wedding ceremonies and ordination of gay clergy members, but they have changed those rules over time.

The last holdout among major mainline Protestant groups has been the United Methodist Church, which had 7.7 million members in the United States as of January 2009. Its doctrine still declares homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching,” prohibits ordination of openly homosexual men and women, and bans same-sex weddings, while urging churches not to reject gay parishioners.

Methodist clergy members like Oliveto have led a growing pastoral revolt against those teachings — she has performed more than 50 “holy union” ceremonies for same-sex couples. And in her church’s liberal California-Nevada conference, 114 pastors from Northern California have signed a petition declaring they are willing to perform holy union ceremonies for same-sex couples, and thus risk being defrocked for violating church rules. More than 1,100 United Methodist pastors nationwide have signed the pledge. In response, 2,700 conservative pastors have signed a letter criticizing those pastors’ stance.

For both sides, the stakes are high.

“It is intense, because people feel very deeply about that issue,” said Maxie Dunnam, a retired Memphis pastor who helps lead national efforts to retain the United Methodist Church’s official position condemning homosexuality. “It’s holistic, it’s human, it’s fair, it’s respectful, and from my perspective, it’s biblical,” he said of the church’s current stance.

Randall Miller, assistant professor of ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, is chairman of the commission that organizes the United Methodists’ quadrennial General Conference in April, when bishops and other delegates from around the world will gather in Florida to consider proposed changes to church doctrine, including eliminating the condemnations of homosexuality.

“The United Methodist Church is a great bellwether of where opinions are going in the general society on the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender inclusion,” said Miller, who will also lead the Northern California delegation to the conference. “Moving the United Methodist Church step by step, and removing these barriers, is a greater step in making the larger society more inclusive.”