|
|
Palo Alto, California, November 7, 2004The session of First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto joins a growing chorus of voices condemning Tuesday's passage of 11 anti-gay state marriage amendments as mean-spirited, materially harmful, and incompatible with the God of love revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. The indications are strong that several of these voter initiatives were placed on the ballot as part of a larger get-out-the-vote strategy designed to bring voters to the polls. Tragically, the sin of leveraging popular contempt for scapegoated minorities as a voter-turnout mechanism has a long history, ranging from the use of anti-Catholicism to anti-Semitism to racism. We condemn the exploitation of all forms of prejudice for political gain by any political party or candidate for public office. Our nation becomes weaker whenever any of us promotes fear of the stranger as a way to increase our own power. We affirm the power of God's unquenchable love to break down the walls of prejudice and transform human hearts, and we rededicate ourselves to continue the struggle to break down those walls and promote human transformation. We reject the use of the Christian scriptures to condemn, demonize, and deny equal rights to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and we find interpretive arguments that seek to impose Old Testament sexual mores on American society to be intellectually bankrupt and incompatible with modern historical-critical Biblical principles of interpretation. As Presbyterians, we affirm the interpretive Rule of Love from our own denomination's position statement, "Presbyterian Understanding and Use of Holy Scripture": "Any interpretation of Scripture IS WRONG that separates or sets in opposition love for God and love for fellow human being... No interpretation of Scripture is correct that leads to or supports contempt for any individual or group of persons either within or outside of the church." [emphasis added] We reject the claim that America should reshape its laws to conform to the Biblical interpretations advocated by a single stream of Christianity. Such an assertion weakens America by rejecting our long history of religious pluralism, and retreats from one of the foundational assumptions of the U.S. Constitution: that Americans should decide our laws using critical inquiry grounded in empirical facts, not based on any particular group's interpretations of a sacred religious text. We affirm our commitment to the church-state separation principles of the Theological Declaration of Barmen, part of our own denomination's Book of Confessions. From Germany in 1934, the authors of the Barmen Declaration wrote: "We reject the false doctrine, as though the church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State." We reaffirm First Presbyterian's stance as a More Light Church, welcoming gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender persons into full membership. Our doors are open to all LGBT people, and we stand ready to offer ceremonies of Holy Union to those same-sex couples who wish to commit their lives to each other in love before God. As Christians, as Americans, and as a people seeking to follow the God of love revealed in Jesus, we can do no less. ABOUT FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH:First Presbyterian Church, Palo Alto is:
Media contacts:
FURTHER INFORMATION:
|