By Bob Roehr
WASHINGTON – "We are mimicking the same old oppressions of the churches we came out of," said Bishop Yvette Flunder. What the LGBT community needs "is not religion as usual, but religion unusual."
The pastor of San Francisco's City of Refuge United Church of Christ was speaking at a Faith and Fairness forum that was organized by the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 2. It was part of a new area of program activity for the national organization.
Bishop Flunder said gays have wandered in the wilderness of not being seen as a whole person or as being loved by God. She asked, "Where did we get our strength to find our way through?" She suggested that part of the answer is that gays are "prophetic people with prophetic gifts" and a unique experience of survival.
Black lesbians and gays are asked to come out, she said. But in doing so, they risk homophobia and separation from family and the broader African-American community.
She urged the LGBT community "to create safe places for people to land," where they do not feel "disconnected from all of the places they have come to love…Where they do not have to play straight. If we create those safe places to land, they will not have to play straight."
Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first Orthodox rabbi to come out and author of "Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition," urged LGBT people to tell their stories and to bring that experience to interpretation of the stories of the Bible.
Turning to Leviticus, chapter 18, which is used against gays, he said, "violence is a piece of that text." One must understand that it is commenting on the use of violence to demasculinize, and not upon loving same sex acts.
He described Sodom as "a wealthy, gated community" where the best way to punish was to sodomize, to demasculinize and humiliate. The thrust of the text is hospitality, not sexual acts.
Rabbi Greenberg urged people to "hold people accountable to how they are reading the text" of the Bible. "We have to used the texts that are used against us to liberate us."
Rev. Robert M. Hardies is a minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC. He said he was drawn to the denomination because of its central belief that "God's love is so great that all people will be saved." He suggested that much of the contemporary furor over gays, which threatens to tear apart denominations, "is less about our love than it is about the nature and the scope of God's love."
He criticized "Churches who worship a god that loves some souls and not all souls; who worships a god that plays favorites, that picks and chooses…A god of some souls is no god at all; it is an idol."
"The best way to tell if you have made God in your own image is if god hates the same people that you do," he said. "Just because we can't bring ourselves to love all of our neighbors and strangers as ourselves doesn't mean that God suffers from a similar defect."
Rev. Albert Scariato, of Saint John's Episcopal Church in Georgetown, quoted "Sister Julie Andrews: 'Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start,'" meaning Genesis. "In the first chapter, three very fundamental premises are established. God created everything and everyone…in God's own image and likeliness. Everyone. Not somebody. Everyone was created in God's image and likeness."
He excoriated the letters of Paul for saying that women should not speak in church, his support of slavery, and his belief that lust could not be part of marriage, as well as his writings on gays. "Thank God Paul was wrong."
During a lively question and discussion period, Rabbi Greenberg called homophobia "one small room in the hotel of misogyny." To be a woman is still humiliating in our society, and to treat a man as a woman is to humiliate him, he said. The issues are bound together and we have to get beyond them.
Rev. Scariato said a lot of the marital problems of straight couples seeking counseling come from the fact that they are trapped in gender roles where they are supposed to act one way or another. Freeing them to act as human beings, rather than male or female, will help gays as well.
The most extended discussion came when Bishop Flunder opined, "It is time for same gender loving persons to vote with their feet and flee oppressive theologies. It is time to support with our presence and resources those ministries that liberate us."
Rabbi Greenberg took a different approach. He reminded the audience that the coming out process can be a long and difficult one for gays, so we should understand that it is not easy for straights to overcome their homophobia.
He said, "We all have to do the hard work of transforming monsters [of the unknown that make us nervous] to wonders." And that means working with people as they exist. We need to address their fears, he said.
Bishop Flunder said that is easier to do when one has the resources of a comfortable middle class life. Too many of the LGBT community who are most vulnerable to the slights of heterosexuals are those without resources to avoid or mitigate those slights.
She said the lesson of AIDS activists, that Silence = Death, is a powerful one. "Sometimes we need to take off our robes, and tie up our loincloths, and go to the temple."
