Subject: IWG Statement Responding to Fred Phelps
From: Interfaith Working Group <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 18:36:50 -0500 (EST)

IWG Statement Responding to Fred Phelps
Philadelphia, January 30, 1999

The Interfaith Working Group is here today because a man felt the need
to drag his family across the country to preach hate and inequality.  But
we are not here to preach hate in return; we know that you must counter
hate with love.  We know that when someone uses their right to free
speech to say something that we disagree with, we must exercise our
free speech, and our freedom of religion, to stand together as people of
many faiths, to counter statements of hatred with acts of love, policies
of exclusion with open doors, and support for institutionalized
inequality with a relentless cry for justice.

There are religious people in the Philadelphia area who work to
promote recognition of the legal and religious equality of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgendered people, and there are congregations and
religious support groups  that welcome all as they are, encouraging faith
and action, and standing together in times of joy and times of sorrow.

We ask everyone to remember that religious people do not speak with
one voice, and we encourage those of who have felt a need for a
religious home, but have seen too much hate and rejection,  to accept
the invitation to visit a welcoming congregation, whether it is American
Baptist, Catholic, Conservative Jewish, Disciples of Christ, Episcopal,
the Ethical Society, Evangelical Lutheran, Quaker, Interfaith, the
Metropolitan Community Church, Non-Demoninational, Presbyterian,
Reconstructionist Jewish, Reform Jewish, Unitarian Universalist,
United Methodist, or United Church of Christ.  

All of these faith traditions are represented in the Interfaith Working
Group Welcoming Congregations Brochure, and most of them plus a
few more are represented on our letterhead.  All of these people of faith
have different theologies; some radically different from each other.  And
yet, all of these people, with their different starting points, have still
come to the same conclusion: that sexual minorities deserve the same
civil rights as everyone else.

-- 

Interfaith Working Group                Religious organizations, congregations
http://www.libertynet.org/iwg           and clergy supporting gay rights,
[email-masked]                      reproductive freedom, and the 
voice: 215-235-3050  fax: 232-0829      separation of church and state.