Here you'll find items posted in 2010

Items on sexual justice from past years are archived:

Presbyterian Welcome announces ... 
retreat 2010

For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning Presbyterian Inquirers and Candidates for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament

We gather to:

• Laugh and cry in the presence of God
• Develop a network of support
• Greet old friends and meet new ones
• Worship with one another
• Claim our call in the changing church!

All those pursuing ordination are invited to join us in retreat.

Dates: July 15–18, 2010
Location: Rural Indiana

Cost: $350 plus travel expenses. In order to gather all of us together, very substantial scholarships are available to all in need. We gratefully thank supportive organizations and congregations for their commitment to the participants and their financial support in helping us gather.

Application Deadline: June 14, 2010

If you are an inquirer or candidate and feel this retreat would be helpful, or if you know someone who is in “the process” please call Mieke’s confidential voicemail at 917-441-8638 or email pastormieke@gmail.com .

Call or email for an application:

917.441.8638
pastormieke@gmail.com
www.presbyterianwelcome.org

Supportive Organizations:

Covenant Network of Presbyterians
More Light Presbyterians
That All May Freely Serve—Michigan
That All May Freely Serve—National
Presbyterian Promise
Presbyterian Rainbow
Presbyterian Welcome
 

Presbyterian Welcome’s mission is to build up and repair the Body of Christ by working for the full inclusion of all disciples without regard to sexual orientation or gender identity.

Community of The Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church Destroyed by arson
[4-10-10]

LZ Granderson, a senior writer and columnist for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, writes about his own life as a gay man whose life with his partner is largely occupied with “grocery shopping and getting my son off to school.”

by Sylvia Thorson-Smith
[3-16-10]

This article has been published originally in our newsletter, Network News, the Winter 2010 issue, pages 28-30.  It is here online in PDF format >>

I have the very good fortune of belonging to a More Light Church in Tucson, Arizona (St. Mark’s Presbyterian). Since I chair the More Light Ministry Team and regularly teach adult ed courses, I think it’s important to provide regular opportunities for our members to study issues of human sexuality, especially as they pertain to our work for LGBT justice.

In January and February, I coordinated a 6-week course called “Querying Queer Sexuality.” The reason I used the term “Queer” is to familiarize our congregation with the changing meaning and context of this term. For many, it still feels like a negative label (weird, odd, abnormal), while within the LGBT and academic communities, it’s been recast as a broadly inclusive term and one that reflects new scholarly thinking (as in queer theory). There is much to discuss about this new terminology, as well as other changing attitudes toward the politics of sexual and gender identity.

I’ve been asked to give an overview of this series in Network News, with the hope that others may be encouraged to do something similar. Following is an outline of the course with comments about the content and process of each session.

Session 1: Body and Soul

This lesson was primarily instructional, providing an overview of recent debates on human sexuality in church and society. It included an introduction to the complex language of sex, gender, and sexual orientation; an analysis of the paradigm shift around sexuality issues that’s occurring in contemporary Christianity; a historical summary of attitudes toward homosexuality, along with the emerging gay rights movement and self-definitions of LGBT persons; and an overview of more than three decades of policy debates on homosexuality in the PCUSA.

Session 2: Male, Female, and Sexual

We were most fortunate to have Dr. James B. Nelson, author of many books on sexual ethics, speak to this class, since he’s retired and living in Tucson. However, there are other ways to address the content of his presentation: connections between traditional gender roles, homophobia, and heterosexism (heterosexual privilege and normativity). The point is to examine how society enforces gender roles (men and women are fundamentally different, men dominate women, only male-female sex is normal), and to see how any variation is met with fear and scorn (homophobia) and efforts to reinforce heterosexual norms (marriage and other privileges for heterosexuals only while insisting that non-heterosexuals remain invisible and outcast).

Session 3: LGBTQIA=Queer

To demonstrate the diversity of views on sexual identity and changing issues of language, three guests spoke to the class: a lesbian, her bisexual partner, and a gay man. They helped the class discuss meanings of and attitudes toward QUEER terminology and shared their diverse perspectives on identity politics, labeling, and the increasing discomfort of fitting into fixed categories of difference.

Session 4: Queer Theology

I taught this class, beginning with small group discussion of two biblical texts (Esther and Luke). Participants were asked to “read these texts through queer eyes” and identify how the texts might be interpreted from the experience of LGBT persons. I then introduced brief highlights of books by leading queer writers: Carter Heyward, Chris Glaser, Robert Goss, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Gary Comstock, and Marvin Ellison.

Session 5:The T in LGBT

On this day, guest speakers – a female-to-male transsexual and the mother of a transsexual daughter, now son -- helped us better understand the range of transgender experiences and issues. This was an immensely informative, truth-telling session, one that stretched our minds far beyond our limited perspectives about sexual and gender variance.

Session 6: (Valentine’s Day) All We Need is Love…and Justice

For the conclusion of the series, we talked about the importance of connecting justice work to our feelings of love and compassion for all of those who are marginalized, excluded, ignorantly misunderstood, and judged through the lens of our own privileged experience. Lastly, the class worked in small groups to discuss a “To Do” list for More Light churches, prepared by More Light Presbyterians, and a list of steps that the session of St. Mark’s adopted on becoming a More Light church. We evaluated how we were doing and what more we need to be doing to live into our mission as a welcoming, activist congregation.

Being a member of a More Light church is empowering, liberating, and challenging. It is delightfully freeing, in the sense that the congregation’s commitment has been proclaimed with a boldness that invites public advocacy without hesitation. St. Mark’s advertises in LGBT event programs, staffs a booth at the annual OUToberfest, invites the gay men’s and LGBTA(ally) choruses to sing in our More Light Sunday services, celebrates Coming Out Day with cake and rainbow sherbet, routinely announces church activities in publications and emails of LGBT groups, and is looking to find other ways to strengthen our witness and our welcome. I offer this educational model with the hope that it will stimulate Network News readers to shed More Light in your congregations and communities. Much help is available on the MLP website (www.mlp.org), and you can email me for more information about this course at sylviats@cox.net.

We’ve probably all heard the chant “we’re here, we’re queer.” May we who are all kinds of queer – LGBTI(intersex)Q(questioning)A(ally) – pray and work tirelessly for the full measure of justice in the Presbyterian church and throughout society!

The author:

From Human Rights Campaign

We have reported earlier on the efforts of PC(USA) leaders to speak out against Uganda's moves to declare homosexuality a crime, as well as the role of U.S. evangelicals in stimulating the anti-gay mood there.  Now here's an invitation for you to speak out, too.

A new law has been proposed in Uganda that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or even death. With Uganda's Parliament about to return, we need the U.S. government to strongly condemn the Ugandan government's murderous campaign to jail and execute LGBT citizens.

Ray Bagnuolo offers an insightful look at the ways anti-LGBT Christian crusaders clothe their efforts in talk of love for the LGBT community – while working for their “change” and their exclusion from ordination and from marriage. He begins:

Chances are that if you are a person who is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender - and you have struggled within the church - chances are, somewhere along the way you heard these words: "We love you but hate your sin." Nothing directed toward people who identify as LGBT could be more disingenuous, more filled with hubris than combining love for another with hatred of some part of their being.

Hamartia or ἁμαρτία, the Greek word for sin frequently used in the Second or New Testament has the meaning of "missing the mark." The idea that distance from God is what needs to be shortened in our faith and personal journeys removes the dialectical premise that Love either replaces sin or leaves one in the throes of sin, pitied and "loved" from a distance.

We recently reported on a call by PC(USA) leaders for Uganda to reject a proposed law which would impose the death penalty on gays.

Now the New York Times has carried a report from Kampala, Uganda, that three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks on “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, heard the Americans discussing “how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution’ whose goal is ]to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.’ ”

Now the three Americans are trying to argue that they had no intention of stoking the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

PVJ's Facebook page

Mitch Trigger, PVJ's Secretary/Communicator, has created a Facebook page where Witherspoon members and others can gather to exchange news and views. Mitch and a few others have posted bits of news, both personal and organizational. But there’s room for more!

Voices of Sophia blog

Heather Reichgott, who has created this new blog for Voices of Sophia, introduces it:

John Harris’ Summit to Shore blogspot

John Shuck’s Shuck and Jive

Got more blogs to recommend?

Plan now for our 2010 Ghost Ranch Seminar!

GHOST RANCH SEMINAR

July 26-August 1, 2010

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