Gay / Lesbian Church Weddings for Denmark, 2012.

Denmark was the first country in the world to provide near-marriage for same-sex couples, in a system of registered partnerships that were widely described as "gay marriage". The only surprise in the announcement that like their Scandinavian neighbours Sweden Norway and Iceland they are to extend this to full marriage is that it has taken them so long. (Finland also has plans for full marriage equality).

The real interest here, is that this legislation explicitly includes gay church weddings, as there are already in Sweden and Iceland, with the approval of the dominant Lutheran Church in those countries.

Denmark is the latest European nation to announce plans to introduce gay marriage, with same-sex couples to be allowed to marry on Church of Denmark premises.

The Danish coalition Government’s church minister, Manu Sareen, told local newspaper Jyllands-Posten that gay men and women will soon be able to marry when legislation is introduced early next year.

“I look forward to the moment the first homosexual couple steps out of the church. I’ll be standing out there throwing rice,” he said.

“I have many friends who are homosexuals and can’t get married. They love their partners the same way heterosexuals do, but they don’t have the right to live it out in the same way. That’s really problematic.”

Denmark was the first country in the world to allow gay civil partnerships with legislation in 1989. Public polls suggest around 69-percent of the population supports same-sex marriage according, The Copenhagen Post reports.

The first same-sex weddings could take place as early as March, 2012 after the legislation is passed.

Star Observer Online

One of the people who participated in Denmark's first near-marriage ceremonies was a minister of religion. For the most part, European Lutherans do not have a problem with partnered gay or lesbian clergy, and most Danes will take this in their stride. Still, there will be some opposition.

....marriage equality in Denmark isn’t welcome by all with some religious leaders opposing the plans fearing it will cause a spilt in the Church of Denmark. Henrik Hojlund, of the Evangelical Lutheran Network, said gay marriage would be “fatal” for the Church and told the same newspaper “The Church of Denmark is being secularised right up to the alter in a desperate and mistaken attempt to meet modern people halfway.”

ATV Today

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Savage Love on the Catholic Church | The Fairfield Mirror

"An openly gay and popular syndicated sex columnist was raised in a Roman Catholic family and at one point attended a school for men looking to become priests. When he admitted his sexuality to his mother, he thought, like other members of the gay community, that he was saying he wouldn’t get married and that he wouldn’t be able to provide her grandchildren.

Today, he’s gay, he’s married and he’s raising a child with his husband. Now he’s making his case for homosexuality against the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church should change its negative opinion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning people (LGBTQ), said Dan Savage in his keynote address for the “Pro-Queer Life” conference on Saturday. Fairfield University provided transportation for students to see him speak at Union Theological Seminary in New York."

The Fairfield Mirror:

Separation of church and state in marriage?

"It isn’t exactly a movement — more of a blogosphere hubbub.

In solidarity with his gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, one well-known evangelical pastor in Minneapolis is taking a stand. As long as his state won’t confer upon homosexuals the legal right to marry, Tony Jones won’t sign a marriage license. He will officiate at a Christian ceremony, what he calls the “sacramental” part of marriage. But he refuses to act as an agent of the state.

“Will you join me,” he asked colleagues online last year, “and refuse to legally marry people?”

In July, Jones made his point personally. He remarried, but this time only sacramentally. “I consider my marriage 100 percent valid,” he told me.

-read the full report at  The Washington Post

Related articles

• Australian minister announces lesbian partner is pregnant as gay marriage debate gathers heat - The Washington Post (itsaqueerworld.blogspot.com)
• Religious Backing for Same-sex Marriage Petition (queeringthechurch.com)

Mormon Prop 8 Apology: A Lesson for Minnesota's Catholic Bishops

As the Minnesota bishops prepare for their determined campaign to prevent marriage equality in their state, they would do well to reflect on the experience of the Mormons in California over Prop 8. As is well known, the Mormons, like the institutional Catholic Church, were among the mainstay of the opposition to equality, donating substantial sums in cash and in kind to funding support for the ballot initiative.

Since the vote, there have been numerous indications that the Mormon leaders have begun to recognize the hurt their actions have caused to their own members. (I would be surprised if the Mormons were to make the same mistake again). In the clearest demonstration yet of this change of heart, a senior member of the Church  has apologised to lesbian and gay Mormons of California. In a move that Joanna Brooks at Religion Dispatches correctly describes as historic, the leader of the church in California invited Elder Marlin K Jensen to a meeting to hear the stories of pain and suffering the Church had caused to gay and lesbian Mormons, not just by the support for Prop 8, but by its entire approach to homosexuals and their place in the Church. At the conclusion of this testimony  - Elder Jensen apologized.

James Alison on Growing Up Gay

James Alison is another important theologian for gay men, although he described himself not as a "gay theologian", but as a theologian who writes from a gay (male) perspective. He was formerly a Dominican priest, who like Fr John McNeill,, was forced out of the priesthood for daring to speak honestly, in his case about gay priests. He has since created a new career as an independent theologian, writing, speaking and leading workshops. His work is characterised by a continuous ability to celebrate the joy of being gay and Catholic,and for a particular attention to the difficulties of young people on first coming out.

This is the focus of this piece, published at his website:

Navigating uncharted waters: the gift of faith and growing up LGBT

The first point which I’d like to make, in a sense, is a big sigh of relief. And the sigh of relief is as follows: if faith were an ideology, and gay were a pathology, how easy this conference would be! Because if faith were an ideology, it would merely say “nyet” to us, and if being gay were a pathology, then we would merely go “oh poor little me”; and the matter would be over. Unfortunately for people who try to present things in the way that makes faith into an ideology, and being LGBT into a pathology, this world has collapsed. The world in which faith is an ideology, and ‘LGBT’ is a pathology, has collapsed. Our ability to have survived into what might pass as adulthood in some of our cases, seems to have borne witness to this. We’re no longer run by the world in which faith is an ideology, and being LGBT is a pathology. But getting out of some of the tracks of thinking, to which many of us have got used, which did rather regard it as though we were perpetually stuck between those two, has taken time.

So what I want us to do today is to start in the morning by looking forward, and looking back, a little bit. This is, remember, with a view to being able to think more creatively this afternoon. So I’m not asking you to look back for reasons of nostalgia – though that can be important – but it’s because a healthy looking back is what empowers a looking forward. This is one of the things which is very important for us. We are all autobiographical animals – we tell stories. And our stories are not based on fixed memories from the past, read towards us; all our stories are told from where we are now, looking backwards. And what I think inspires us to be able to think about these stories, is the gift of hope. And I want to make – this is my second point: the difference between hope and optimism. Often the two are confused. Optimism is, if you like, a strategic matter: I try and examine what the forces in play are, in the society in which I live, or in the church, or whatever, and I ask myself, ‘am I optimistic or am I pessimistic?’. But this proposes that, or this imagines that, one is in a battle with something, on one’s own level, and one is optimistic or pessimistic depending on who gets elected pope, what the bishop is like, etc etc – things like this. Hope is something entirely different. Hope is a gift, given us by Someone Else, who s pulling us out of where we are, into something bigger. Hope is actually compatible with a great deal of non-optimism, with quite a sanguine assessment of the reality of our situation. But hope is a theological virtue, a gift – we’re going to be looking at how faith is a gift in just a second – it presupposes Someone Else, to wit, God, pulling us out of a situation, and opening us up into something bigger. It’s that that I want to focus on, because it’s in the degree to which we are able to imagine someone else doing that for us, that we are able to retell our stories, in more open, more critical, more relaxed ways, in such a way that they will open our trajectories out to open and more creative futures. Does that make sense? [pause] Good.

(Read the full article)

Books by James Alison
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay
On Being Liked
Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in
Broken Hearts New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal
(Forthcoming)

Related articles

• James Alison on Growing Up Gay (queertheology.blogspot.com)
• James Alison Book Launch: "Broken Hearts and New Creation" (opentabernacle.wordpress.com)
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• What IS a Gay Catholic to do? A Question Comes Out of the Closet. (my-queer-spirituality.blogspot.com)
• "Amidst the Stones and the Dust" - James Alison's Theology for Much-Loved Queers. (queertheology.blogspot.com)
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"And Grace Will Lead Me Home": A Conservative, Evangelical, Theological Case for Gay Marriage

There are, thankfully, many sources available today which can counter and debunk the infamous clobber texts which have for so long been used abused in the course of bigotry and exclusion. There are also an increasing number of progressive theologians who have thoughtfully addressed considered matters from an LGBT or queer perspective, and developed a growing body of gay and lesbian, or queer, theology. What we do not often see is sympathetic theology from a conservative evangelical straight ally.

I was delighted therefore. to come across a recent paper by Dr Mark, Achtemeier, who describes himself as can “out, self-affirming, practicing conservative evangelical”, in which he tells of the process of theological enquiry which led him to reverse his longstanding opposition to LGBT inclusion, and instead to argue in favour of same –sex marriage and ordination. Addressing the Covenant Network of Presbyterians on November 5 2009, Dr Achtermeier begins cautiously:

I have every confidence in the ability of my colleagues to address this discussion with genuine wisdom and deep insight. For myself I confess the topic makes me nervous. The reason is this: if you had told me just eight or nine years ago that on this date I would be standing before this group, speaking out in favor of marriage and ordination for lesbian and gay Christians, I would have declared you out of your mind.

But here I am, and here you are. And all I can say is that because of this experience I have learned never to make confident predictions about any situation in which God is involved.