Session’s resolution condemns 11 pro-marriage amendments
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, November 9, 2004
The session of a congregation that calls itself a “More Light … Earth and Spirit Church” has condemned the voters’ approval of constitutional amendments in 11 states that defend traditional marriage.
Those votes were ” “mean-spirited, materially harmful, and incompatible with the God of love revealed in Jesus of Nazareth,” according to a resolution adopted by the session of First Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto, Calif.
The state amendments said little more than what is stated in the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which also defines marriage as a union only between a man and a woman and not as a same-gender relationship.
The California congregation has been in the eye of a Presbyterian storm in the past. Its minister, the Rev. Rob Martin, was accused of heresy by failing to affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, but a presbytery investigating committee quashed the charge. Martin’s installation at Palo Alto was held up for months before the Presbytery of Western North Carolina, from which he was transferring, decided not to prosecute the heresy charge.
The Palo Alto session’s resolution declared that the amendment referendums were “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.”
The session added, “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 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.”
The resolution argued that America should not “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.”