Gay and Baptist: How an Oxymoron May Save the Church

[cbayer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-stephen-v-sprinkle-phd/gay-and-baptist-how-an-oxymoron-may-save-the-church-yet_b_2561793.html

Rev. Stephen V. Sprinkle, Ph.D.
Author, 'Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memories of LGBTQ Hate Crimes Victims'
Posted: 01/27/2013 11:29 am

An ordained gay Baptist preacher and his life partner who were refused a marriage license in Jefferson County accepted arrest rather than betray their Christian conviction that anti-gay laws are unjust. By implication, the Rev. Maurice "Bojangles" Blanchard and his husband, Dominique James, both members in good standing in a local Baptist congregation, stood in contradiction to the widely held cultural and spiritual assumption that gay people are "abominations" before God, and should have none of the common rights to marriage afforded to all other citizens by the civil state. Despite the shockwaves their non-violent protest is sending throughout evangelical Protestantism and Baptist life in particular, their act of conscience may save the church yet.

The facts of the protest action carried out by the Rev. Bojangles and Dominique are these: on Tuesday, Jan. 22, the couple, wearing crosses on their ski caps, requested a license to marry from the Clerk's Office, and were refused. When asked why she refused them, Sandy Byerly, manager of the license office, said that she was upholding the law of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which wrote anti-gay discrimination into the state constitution in 2004 by an amendment saying that "only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be a marriage in Kentucky," according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Further, any clerk who willfully defies state law and issues a marriage license to a same-sex couple anyway will be removed from office and is subject to a year in jail. After the refusal by the clerk, the gay couple staged a peaceful pray-in until they were arrested and charged with trespassing at 5 p.m., when the clerk's office closed for the day. Offered the option of being cited for the offense rather than being arrested, the Baptist preacher and his spouse told the Metro Police officer that they had a "spiritual obligation" to resist the injustice of a law that denied them their civil right to marriage. As the Rev. Bojangles said prior to entering the clerk's office, "If we don't act, we are accomplices in our own discrimination. We have to resist." The couple was led to a waiting patrol car, and were transported to the Metro Corrections Center where they were booked. Jefferson County Clerk Bobbi Holsclaw told reporters that the ordained minister and his spouse were protesting in the wrong place. Instead of disturbing the clerk's office, she said, they should instead have taken their argument up with the state legislature.

Selah (Hebrew for "pause" -- found in the Book of Psalms).

The vast majority of Christians in the United States consider themselves law-abiding citizens, and shy away from public acts that defy law and order. Among ordained ministers, the aversion to any controversial word or deed, inside or outside of the congregation, is particularly high. Preachers, by-and-large, consider the office of prophet to be a historic artifact of First Testament history, not an obligation for modern spiritual shepherds. Prophetic action of the sort the good Reverend took in the county clerk's office is decidedly not a career enhancing choice. Controversy in the ministry can get ministers fired, and their families booted out of the parsonage.

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[okasha]

1. Courageous action.

MLK has two more heirs.