San Francisco’s 90,000-strong homosexual community has exploded in a new militancy to make society recognize that “gay is good.” A recent three-day seminar for ministers, counselors, and social workers sponsored by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in “the gay jewel of the Western Hemisphere” stressed the need for people to consider the homosexual life style equally as acceptable as the heterosexual one.
Spokesmen from radical gay organizations (Gay Liberation Front, Gay Women’s Liberation) and liberal ones (Society for Individual Rights, Daughters of Bilitis) were united in their rejection of views that homosexuality is unnatural, immoral, sick, or socially objectionable. Rather, they considered the gay life as a completely normal and satisfying option for sexual fulfillment.
The seminar stressed that an increasing number of homosexuals are weary of “closet queen” existence—concealing their homosexuality behind a “straight life” facade—and are determined to resist social ostracism, employment discrimination, and legal harassment.
Gay seminarian Nick Benton of Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion told conferees that “Christianity has been one of the main causes of homosexual repression.” He said gay students in seminaries related to the Graduate Theological Union were planning to request publicly that their schools make clear their position on homosexual relationships and ordination.
Former Episcopalian James Foster, political-action chairman of the Society for Individual Rights, stated: “I am not convinced that there is validity to the Judaeo-Christian ethic of sexuality.” He commended the Reverend Troy Perry of the homosexual Metropolitan Community Church “for getting gay people together” (see Sept. 11 issue, page 48).
Daughters of Bilitis president Ruth Sudul, a pretty, 21-year-old Seventh-day Adventist, saw no conflict between her lesbian life and biblical teachings on sex. Paul’s statements against homosexuality in Romans, she said, “referred to promiscuity and lust, not homosexuality per se. A lasting homosexual relationship is not a sin, but sex for the sake of sex is wrong.”
Militant Homosexuals
The Gay Liberation Front caused a furor among 600 Episcopal delegates to the Diocese of Michigan’s annual convention when two Gay Lib members spit out Communion wine near the altar. Others hugged and kissed in the pews and aisles at St. Paul’s Cathedral, according to Hiley Ward, religion editor of the Detroit Free Press.
The diocesan convention was later adjourned early when twenty Gay Libbers marched to the podium carrying signs and shouting slogans. The disruption took place when a Gay Lib leader was not allowed to speak in favor of a resolution encouraging Episcopal churches to lend their facilities to homosexuals.
A Gay Lib member yelled to departing delegates: “What are you going to do when you have a Christian son or daughter that’s a homosexual? Are you going to disown them, too?”
Several days later in Washington, D. C., about thirty-five militant homosexuals held hands, hugged, kissed, and shouted obscenities as they disrupted a conference on theology and homosexuality at Catholic University.
The D. C. chapter of the Gay Lib did its thing after conference chairman Dr. John Cavanagh began a treatise on homosexuality as a cause of marital discord. While his companions embraced on stage, a fuzzy-haired spokesman read from a pink mimeographed sheet: “As members of the Gay Liberation Front, we deny your right to conduct this seminar.”
The spokesman (none of the dissidents revealed his or her name) demanded that conference members stop examining homosexuality and begin practicing it instead. The demonstrators paraded a pink flag around the room several times before leaving.
Seminar members gained a glimpse of gay life through a multi-media, three-screen presentation of explicit films of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian couples copulating simultaneously to rock music. The group also visited a “SIR” Halloween Ball, and gay bars where fifty elaborately coifed and garbed queens in drag swished on stage to entertain dancing male couples. The largest charge came from “The Hollywood Canteen,” a bevy of campy queens decked out as the Andrews Sisters, Betty Grable, Anna Mae Wong, Shirley Temple, June Allyson, Jane Froman, and Kate Smith.
Methodist minister Dr. John Moore, campus pastor at the University of California at Davis, emphasized in the final session the need for homosexuals to enter depth relationships. He added that he had observed greater stability in some homosexual marriages than in heterosexual ones.
The seminar ended with a prediction by Sally Gearhart, a former Lutheran college instructor, that the homosexual movement is likely to turn more radical. Throughout the conference, speakers made no concessions to the view that God’s plan for human sexual fulfillment is found only in a heterosexual relationship.
A San Francisco graffiti writer knew better. He wrote: “If God had wanted homosexuals, he would have created Adam and Freddy.”
Presbyterian Lay Group Opposes Cocu
The board of directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee unanimously approved a resolution recently opposing the Consultation on Church Union Plan of Union. (An influential group of Southern Presbyterians also has issued a statement opposing inclusion of its denomination in COCU—see November 6 issue, page 59.)
The Presbyterian Lay Committee stresses biblical authority and discourages social-action-type pronouncements by the national church. Here is the complete COCU text:
WHEREAS the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) has drafted a Plan for the uniting of nine churches (denominations) which draft has been “commended to the churches for study and response,” and
WHEREAS the Board of Directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee has carefully studied and discussed the said draft and respectfully responds thereto as follows:
A. The Board considers the following provisions of the Plan to be unacceptable:
—provisions which deprive members of a congregation of their present right to select a minister for that congregation and which substitute therefor the nomination of ministers by bishops and district and parish committees and their election by the parish—not by the congregation.
—provisions which deprive members of a congregation of their present right to elect their own officers and which eliminate the offices of elders and trustees of individual congregations.
—provisions which deprive members of a congregation of their present right to determine the general programs of their congregation and the use to which funds contributed by them shall be devoted and which substitute therefor the determination of such matters by parishes.
—provisions which require all church property—including houses of worship, manses, endowment funds and other congregational assets—to be transferred from congregational ownership to parish ownership.
—provisions which permit parishes to determine whether the Word of God shall continue to be preached in any given church edifice and whether that edifice shall be disposed of or used for wholly different purposes.
—provisions which eliminate congregations as basic units and which substitute therefor parishes as basic units.
—many other provisions which discard our present form of democratic government and substitute therefor the episcopal form headed by bishops and councils with local congregations having no existence except as these bishops and councils, separated and isolated from members of congregations, may determine from time to time.
B. The Board finds no substantial benefits but many grave dangers inherent in the “super-church” concept as set forth in the Plan.
NOW, THEREFORE, the Board of Directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, after careful study and discussion, hereby records its opposition to the proposed Plan of Union and urges like-minded Presbyterians, after their own careful study, to register their opposition thereto with their pastors, sessions, presbyteries, and synods and with such other study groups as are open to them, and to urge other like-minded Presbyterians to do likewise.
Tale Of Two Schools: Playing With Moral Fire?
Students at church-related colleges are apparently faring less well on the campus-control issue than their counterparts at the big secular schools. The 1,700 students at Carson-Newman College (Southern Baptist) in Jefferson City, Tennessee, must dance to the tune of the constituency, ruled purse-jingling Tennessee Baptist Convention delegates last month. And, despite demonstrations and a fire at St. Bonaventure University (Roman Catholic) in Olean, New York, President Reginald A. Redlon clung to his decision: the 2,000 boys and girls will not be allowed to visit each other’s rooms.
Carson-Newman trustees earlier this year bowed to student pressure and lifted a 119-year campus ban on dancing, taboo in most Baptist circles. In protest, one hundred of the Tennessee Baptist Convention’s 1,700 churches halted their giving to the TBC, which subsidizes Carson-Newman by $406,000 annually. Pressed by the constituency, TBC leaders instructed the trustees to restore the dance ban. The trustees countered with a plea that the TBC study social needs on campus. Off-campus facilities and events in the town were few, they explained, and limited funds permitted only a monthly concert on campus.
Meanwhile, several dances were held, but attendance was poor.
Later, the matter spilled onto the floor of the annual TBC meeting in Jackson. Some speakers charged that dancing is sinful and leads to immorality. Others pleaded for confidence in the students and trustees. “It’s better to be at a chaperoned dance than off in a parked car somewhere without supervision.” declared a mother of two collegians. Unswayed, the 1,200 delegates voted two to one to skip any fact-finding studies and to direct the trustees to stop the dances.
Student officers promptly scheduled an off-campus dance and forecast the biggest turnout ever. Demonstrations, though, are out (to spare the sympathetic faculty and administration further anguish), and campus dancing is now officially a “dead issue,” stated student president Robert Mayfield. But pressure for “other reforms”—including a liberalized dress code—will continue. “The real issue to us is freedom of choice,” he said. “What hurts most is the narrow-mindedness of the majority, who refused to consider our needs or even to listen to us.”
Other students feel they were merely victims caught in a squeeze over who controls the college—TBC church members or the trustees. As if to make a point, TBC officials reinstituted “orientation” sessions for new trustees.
At St. Bonaventure, President Redlon is in complete charge of the situation for now, reportedly with solid backing from parents and alumni. About one-third of his students staged “visit-in” demonstrations after he refused to grant dormitory inter-visitation freedom. When he threatened to shut down the school, students backed off to await a ruling by trustees. A blaze, suspectedly arson, destroyed campus property valued at $100,000 and Redlon announced he would provide “additional security in the dorm areas.”
A bomb threat interrupted the meeting of trustees, who decided to call in outside help to mediate the dispute. Willoughby Abner, director of the National Center for Dispute Settlements (a Ford Foundation project in Washington, D. C.), would listen to both sides and make nonbinding recommendations, the trustees said.
Redlon is unlikely to change his mind. He sees a “theological dimension” to inter-visitation related to the Fall of Man. Explained he: “No young person can live hourly in a situation which may be conducive to selfishness and which discourages discipline—without paying a great price.”
EDWARD PLOWMAN and
ROSEMARY STEPHENS
Panorama
Enthusiasm for the nine-way Consultation on Church Union merger has waned in the 500,000-member Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Its bishops last month pressed union with the two other black Methodist COCU partners (the AME and AMEZ) and said “there is little sentiment in our denomination to unite with a white church that would cause [us] to be a small minority.” Meanwhile, COCU extended by six months to June 1, 1972, the period for study and criticism of its plan of union.
Plans for a third round of theological conversations between Lutheran and Eastern Orthodox churchmen fizzled last month because the Orthodox group preferred talks with other communions.
Bob Jones University has been rapped by the Federal Communications Commission for not complying with equal-employment provisions in the operation of its radio station WMUU in Greenville, South Carolina.
Evangelist Leighton Ford’s Jackson, Tennessee, eight-day crusade drew 30,100 people; 364 registered decisions for Christ.
Young adults (18 to 25) think about sex twice as often as they do about religion, but middle-aged and older adults think about religion at least twice as often as sex, according to a survey of 3,416 persons made by a Louisville psychologist.
“The Worshipbook,” produced for the Cumberland, Southern, and United Presbyterian churches last month, uses nothing but contemporary language in its services and prayers; a later version—due in about two years—will include hymns.
MGM Records has barred lyrics about drugs and won’t record rock groups that use hard narcotics.
Deaths
HAROLD M. DUDLEY, 74, founder of Religious Heritage of America in 1957; in Washington, D. C.
FREDERIC C. KREISS, 64, pastor and president of the Free Lutheran Church of France and Belgium; in Strasbourg, France, of a heart attack.
ARTHUR S. MAXWELL, 74, noted Seventh-day Adventist author-editor; in Mountain View, California.
Minister-editor Dr. W. S. Whitcombe of Toronto has been named president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada.
Dr. Frank E. Johnston, associate general-secretary of the American Baptist Convention, has been named interim head of the denomination, beginning January 1, until a successor to Dr. Edwin H. Tuller, who resigned, is appointed.
Catholic theologian-professor Bernard Lonergan, a Jesuit, will be a guest professor of Catholic theology at Harvard Divinity School for the 1971–72 term.
The Reverend Chang Duk Yun has been elected bishop of the 82,000-member autonomous Methodist Church of Korea.
Bishop Elias Muawad of Sleppo, Syria, has been elected the 163rd patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and the Entire East; he will reign as Patriarch Elias IV.
Los Angeles structural engineer Roy G. Johnston was named chairman of the Westmont (Santa Barbara, California) College trustees.
World Scene
Although the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil withdrew from the fifth assembly of the Lutheran World Federation because the assembly last June was shifted from Brazil to Evian, France, the Brazil church voted recently to remain in the LWF.
The last holdout against the ordination of women in German Protestantism fell last month when the Lutheran Church in Bavaria approved the practice.
Sale of the United Church of Canada’s 140-year-old Ryerson Press to McGraw-Hill of Canada, subsidiary of the giant U. S. firm, raised a howl from Canadians opposed to U. S. control. Ryerson lost $500,000 in the past three years.
The long-standing debate over the boundaries of ancient Jerusalem may be settled with the discovery, just west of the Temple Mount, of a city-wall foundation dating to the seventh century B.C. The wall proves that Israelite Jerusalem had moved westward to the present-day Jewish Quarter prior to the Babylonian Exile (586 B.C.), according to Naham Avigad, head of the exploring archaeological team.
After reaffirming its belief in the doctrines of the Resurrection and life after death, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand withdrew a motion to oust the head of its seminary in Dunedin, who reportedly denies both doctrines.
Four defendants, including a former cabinet minister in the Irish government, have been cleared of charges in the attempted illegal import of arms and ammunition for the use of Catholics in Northern Ireland, thus ending one of the country’s most sensational trials.
The Anglican Church in the Province of South Africa voted 140 to 6 to stay in the World Council of Churches but criticized the council’s grants to guerrilla liberation groups and held up its annual donation pending explanation from the WCC (see November 20 issue, page 44).
The new moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church, the most powerful denomination in South Africa, bluntly defended his church’s interpretation of the Bible that apartheid is right and “all other theologians in the world” are wrong. Dr. J. D. Vorster—brother of Prime Minister B. J. Vorster—said his church would sever ties with all others rather than change its views on race.
Pakistan’s Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians united in one church last month. The 200,000-member denomination issued no statement of faith; a confession and liturgy will evolve.
