The UMC, a global church, prides itself on its democratic and decentralized polity. All this shapes its response to LGBTQ couples and clergy.
same-sex marriage
The UMC's response to declining membership is to spend millions deciding who else we can exclude.
A civil debate about religious freedom
John Corvino, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis agree: religious liberty is good, discrimination is bad, and the clash between these values is complicated.
Like many legal and moral disputes, the case involving a Colorado bakery and a same-sex couple hinges on finding the right analogy.
The morality of marriage equality
Many Americans have gone from being squeamish about same-sex marriage to being squeamish about telling their gay friends that their relationships are less than valid.
The Episcopal Church was and is right to affirm same-sex marriage. Now we should be willing to face the costs.
Insisting that a government office answer to the law rather than to a given official’s religious beliefs isn’t de-prioritizing religious freedom in favor of something else. It is religious freedom.
The aftermath of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision included some thoughtful responses from evangelicals who don’t support it. Mark Galli’s is pretty good. So is this piece by Carey Nieuwhof, a useful list of things for anti-SSM church leaders to keep in mind. I do think Nieuwhof oversells his first point, “the church has always been countercultural.”
I have carried the burden of knowing that our church contributed to a man's death when we refused him the open acceptance, love, and support that he needed.
Did you hear about the for-profit wedding chapel owners in Idaho who are claiming a constitutional right (pdf) to refuse services to same-sex couples? From Marci Glass's entertaining post:
I hate to be the one to point this out to the Reverends Knapp, but they are not, in fact, pastors of a church. They own a wedding mill.
It's often said that in a tolerance-obsessed culture, everything is tolerated—except intolerance. Actually, this gets said a lot more often than perhaps it should, because being intolerant is not the same sort of thing as being black or female or gay or Muslim. Tolerating people is more fundamental than tolerating their ideas. Yet tolerating ideas matters, too.
A growing number of UMC clergy are performing same-sex weddings in open defiance of the Book of Discipline. What happens next?