Date: Tue, 22 Mar 94 19:11:50 EST From: Louie Crew Subject: Recent History of Lesbigay Issues in ECUSA The Episcopal Church and Lesbigay Issues A Half-Snap, Quick Review by Louie Crew ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyrighted 1994 by Louie Crew. Use freely on the condition that you send to the author a copy of the full printed document in which it appears. Louie Crew, Box 30, Newark, NJ 07101. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Episcopal Church has grappled simultaneously with lesbian and gay issues and with the priesthood of women over the last 20 years. The Episcopal Church is governed principally at the diocesan level, with bishops ordaining priests. National leadership is exercised by The General Convention, a bicameral group, comprised of the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies. General Convention meets triennially, and during the interim, the Presiding Bishop and Executive Council provide oversight. The Presiding Bishop oversees the Episcopal Church Center and presides in the House of Bishops. In addition to the triennial meeting of General Convention, The House of Bishops meets at irregular intervals as needed, at least once a year. General Convention governs the church through its Constitution and Canons, and it advises the church through resolutions. The church has never addressed lesbian and gay issues through its canons, and hence it may be said that the church has never officially proscribed lesbian and gay behavior on the part of priests or laity, though in fact, it has long manifested the prejudices of any age. 1974 Louie Crew founded Integrity, out of Fort Valley, Georgia, in October. The first chapter met in December, in Chicago. The House of Bishops rushed to create a Task Force on Homophiles and the Ministry, when a bishop from Florida had asked what to do with "queer priests." Ordination of "The Philadelphia Eleven" first women priests in the Episcopal Church. These ordinations were declared "irregular" since the General Convention had frequently considered but not yet voted to approve the ordination of women. 1975 Integrity held its first national convention at the Cathedral of St. James in Chicago, with theologian Norman Pittenger as the central speaker. Ellen Barrett and James Wickliff served as Integrity's first co-presidents. More "irregular" ordinations of women took place in Washington, DC. 1976 General Convention passed a resolution "Homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church." Integrity members had proposed this wording a year earlier when they with The Standing Commission on Human Affairs, which presented the resolution. Integrity had its first booth at General Convention and has been at every General Convention since. General Convention changed the canons to permit the ordination of women, and it "regularized" the earlier ordinations in Philadelphia and Washington. General Convention passed (and reaffirmed in 1979 and 1983) resolutions supporting the civil rights of lesbians and gays. 1977 Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, Jr., Bishop of New York, ordained Ellen Marie Barrett to the priesthood in January (the earliest possible month). The House of Bishops meeting in Port St. Lucie said ordinations of lesbians and gays should not happen. They passed a strong resolution condemning homosexuality as unbiblical. They asserted the church "is right to confine its nuptial blessing exclusively to heterosexual marriage." They tabled a measure to censure Bishop Moore. They adopted a "conscience clause" permitting bishops to refuse to ordain women. 1979 General Convention passed a resolution milder than that of the House of Bishops at Port St. Lucie. In a compromise they said it was inappropriate to ordain anyone sexually active outside the bonds of heterosexual marriage. Over three dozen bishops, have signed a dissent document stating that as an act of conscience they can not abide by that resolution. One of the original dissenters was Rt. Rev. Edmond Browning while he was still Bishop of Hawaii. He is now the Presiding Bishop. At about this time The Rev. Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven, a theologian serving as professor at the Episcopal Divinity School came out as lesbian, as have dozens of others. Throughout the period from 1979 onward, many bishops have more actively ordained lesbians and gays who are open throughout the ordination process --to their sponsoring congregations, to diocesan commissions on ministry, to the diocesan standing committee, and to their ordaining bishops. Few of these ordinations come to the attention of the press, nor do those in the process seek to publicize them as such. Those which have come to the attention of the Integrity leaders now number over 100, with dozens of these as members of Integrity. The Diocese of California began the Parsonage, a jubilee ministry in the Castro, a lesbian and gay neighborhood. 1982 The Bishop of Louisiana denied Integrity permission to use any Episcopal Church during General Convention in New Orleans. 1984 A group of conservative bishops met in January to pursue ways to "revitalize" the Episcopal Church. One of the key players was Rt. Rev. William Frey, Bishop of Colorado, and a candidate for the office of Presiding Bishop. A year later, this group became Episcopalians United for Revelation, Renewal, and Reformation (EURRR). 1985 General Convention elected the Most Rev. Edmond L. Browning as Presiding Bishop. At his installation he promised "There will be no outcasts in this church of ours." General Convention called for three years of dialog on the homosexual issue. 1986 EURRR was officially founded. From the beginning, the group aggressively led in opposition to the ordination of lesbians and gays and to the blessing of our relationships. They have attacked Integrity in every issue of their publication. 1988 No dialog occurred between 1985 and 1988, but as a compromise, to sweep everything under the rug, General Convention again called for three years of dialog. For the first time Integrity was credited by friends and foes alike as having the best political network at the convention. The AIDS quilt was on display in the same convention center directly under the huge hall used by the House of Deputies, and the quilt replaced the official convention chapel as the venue of choice for private mediations of most of the deputies. The Diocese of Massachusetts elected as suffragan the first female bishop in Anglican history, The Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris. Harris, among other things, had directed the Consultation, an umbrella progressive group of which Integrity is a member with Union of Black Episcopalians, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, and the Episcopal Women's Caucus. 1989 The Rev. Todd Wetzel became the director of EURRR, and launched an even more strident attack on any bishops supportive of lesbians and gays. Rt. Rev. John Spong, Bishop of Newark, in a highly publicized event, ordained the Rev. Robert Williams and commissioned him as the chief missioner for the Oasis, a diocesan ministry with lesbians and gays. The Oasis Board later called for Williams' resignation because of his maverick style and his refusal to work with his bishop. They chose as his successor The Rev. David Norgard, who had been ordained as an openly gay man, in the diocese of Minnesota, in 1984. 1991 General Convention faced up to the fact that the church had not actually had dialog for the last three years and called for a structure to ensure dialog for the next three, with a mechanism to report the results from parish to diocese to national church. It stressed that it wanted dialogue, not argumentation. Those opposed to ordaining lesbians and gays presented a resolution "All members of the clergy of this church...shall be under the obligation to abstain from sexual relations outside holy matrimony." The resolution failed! Although the resolution did not name lesbians and gays, members of both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies identified the Catch 22 and voted accordingly. Instead, the Convention passed a resolution reaffirming heterosexual marriage as the tradition of the Episcopal Church but acknowledged that many faithful Episcopalians are living in discontinuity with this tradition. Opponents of lesbians and gays left the convention howling that they had lost and that the Episcopal Church was moving towards heresy. The House of Deputies elected its first woman ever to serve as its president. For the first time openly gay and lesbian Integrity members served as deputies in the House of Deputies. At General Convention, about 3,000 people attended an evening hearing. To speak on behalf of gay and lesbian issues, Integrity selected the Bishop of Los Angeles, an openly gay priest, and an openly lesbian priest. On departure from the hearing, several hundred joined in a circle to sing "We are a gentle, angry people." 1992 Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning spoke at the Integrity national convention in Houston, spurned by the Bishop of Texas and scorned by Episcopalians United. 1993 President Pamela Chinnis of the House of Deputies spoke at the Integrity national convention in San Diego, spurned by the Bishop of San Diego, came out as the mother of a gay son, and pledged to use her appointment powers to put lesbian and gay deputies on committees of General Convention. The opposition vigorously attacked her, accusing her of threatening to stack committees. They failed to notice that Mrs. Chinnis could hardly stack committees with the small number of Integrity members elected for the 1994 General Convention. What she was actually pledging was to reverse the blatantly discriminatory practice of her predecessor as President of the House, Dean David Collins, who had openly refused to appoint to commissions and committees any deputy he knew to be lesbian or gay. 1994 The 70th General Convention of the Episcopal Church will meet in Indianapolis in August. EURRR, will come to General Convention with an annual budget of $1,040,000. They have waged steady war on the Presiding Bishop and President Chinnis for the inclusive policies, and they are widely credited with gutting support the support for the national church in many dioceses, with a short-fall announced this year of $5 million dollars. The Church Center has had to close most of its foreign missions, its AIDS desk, and many other major projects of inclusion. One bishop has proposed a canon that would deny anyone permission to bless commitments of lesbians and gays. Three dioceses have passed resolutions asking General Convention to begin the process of drafting liturgies for such blessings. Twelve Integrity members head as deputies towards General Convention in Indianapolis, including Dr. Louie Crew, Integrity's founder, who won the most votes of any deputy, lay or clergy, in the Diocese of Newark. Crew will co-chair the Newark deputation, on which Edgar K. Byham, Esq., Integrity's past president and current chief information officer, serves as an alternate. At General Convention, women will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ordination of women and lesbians and gays will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Integrity. The Rt. Rev. Mary Adelia McLeod, Bishop of Vermont and the first female diocesan bishop in the Episcopal Church, will be one of the con-celebrants of the Integrity Eucharist, at which the chief celebrant will be Rt. Rev. Bennett Sims, retired Bishop of Atlanta and prime adversary who summoned Crew for discipline shortly after he founded Integrity. Sims, a chief architect of the 1979 resolution inhibiting the ordination of lesbians and gays, has since repented of his homophobia. Crew will be the preacher. The Larger Context Lesbigays have organized in every Christian denomination. So has the reaction of the Rabid Right, beginning with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1970's, augmented and continued by the PTL Club, Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanan, Ron Wilder, and others. Most credit The Religious Right with holding strangle-hold on the Republican Party. In at least one denomination, Southern Baptists, the right managed to get such a stranglehold that it now controls all seminaries and universities. When Pullen Memorial Church blessed the relationship of a gay couple in 1993, the Southern Baptist Convention ousted them, and changed its fundamental principle of the autonomy of individual congregations: lesbigay sexuality is now the only issue whatsoever that individual congregations are not free to decide for themselves. Presbyterians have also played around with their constitution on the matters of autonomy to thwart support for lesbigay ordinands. That is real power, albeit negative, so to frighten people that they violate their own most basic principles. The organized opposition is novel. In 1969, the year of the Stonewall Rebellion that marked the beginning of the current phase of the lesbigay movement, no one was paying a dime to "heal" homosexuals. The notion that homosexuality was a sickness lacked compassion and lacked commitment. Individual "healers" may actually be responding to their notions of how to respond to hurting homosexuals, but their funders are responding mainly to the political need to give some evidence of their fake spiritual claims to "love" the but not the sin. These ministries, often embarrassing even to their stingy funders, mirror a similar effort in the 1950s on the part of Southerners to invest in black schools to give a bit more credence to their claims of "separate but equal" -- separate, but equal only by dime-store cosmetics. The scapegoating factor is crucial, I think. It is much more a motivation than is theology in the minds of many of those organized against us. People seek power, and they use hetero-ignorance to unite people. We're the only group around now that it is safe to fear openly. The hatred often masks other political agendas. During these same two decades the nation has feasted, even glutted, on a never-ending stream of talk shows, which far more comprehensively than any church-mandated "study," have orchestrated the public discourse on lesbian and gay issues. In my view, these have fallen on hard times in the last 10 years, with a predilection to present most guests as freaks. In the early days of Phil Donoghue and Opra Winfrey, lesbians and gays and our friends were presented as far less bizarre and in a context of eavesdropping that was far less prurient. A sleeper through all of this has been the issue of Blessing of Lesbigay Relationships. In Episcopal discussions, ordination has received first billing chronologically and substantively. Many who now introduce resolutions to bless relationships (including some conservatives), argue that blessing gay relations should come first. It certainly would make more sense to argue for clergy to be married if we had first set up a way for lesbigay clergy to be married...... The Diocese of Rochester has been blessing lesbigay relationships officially for at least 10 years. In most other dioceses they have occurred "underground," sometimes without the knowledge of the bishop, sometimes with the knowledge of the bishop but under the condition that they do not make the press. From the early 1980s AIDS has had a dramatic effect in awakening persons to the need for blessing alternatives to promiscuity. AIDS has also dramatically influenced our command to the church's attention. Many congregations have moved much more readily to love us in our deaths than to treat us with justice while alive. AIDS has taken some of our important champions. AIDS ministries have called us into much greater spiritual depth, into much more comprehensive awareness of lesbigay "community." In the Episcopal Church, AIDS ministries have made important use of some of our most talented lesbigay priests, including Elizabeth Kaeton, Ted Karpf and Rand Frew.