As anti-discrimination vote nears, a surprise from Kalamazoo clergy

(Creative Commons photo by Jacob Enos via Flickr)

KALAMAZOO — When local residents were in the early stages of debating a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance last year, Rev. Douglas Vernon’s flock was debating a more fundamental question.

Vernon, the senior pastor of First United Methodist Church of Kalamazoo, explained in a recent interview how his congregation had engaged in two and a half years of prayer and deep reflection on the Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline and that text’s teaching on homosexuality:

Homosexuals, no less than heterosexuals, are persons of sacred worth, but their lifestyle goes against Christian teaching.

The 40-year-veteran of the Methodist clergy recites the line by memory. And he then explains how his downtown Kalamazoo church went on to commit an act of denominational defiance.

“Our congregation became a reconciling congregation,” Vernon said proudly. “We chose to welcome all persons and we’ve developed a welcoming statement,” he said, noting that statement specifically welcomes all regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

“For our congregation to take that decision was a rather momentous step.”

Vernon’s congregation is one of only a handful of local churches that have embraced the proposed Ordinance 1856, an initiative on Kalamazoo’s Nov. 3 ballot that seeks to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. That makes his Methodist church a surprising exception to the often predictable rule of religious divisions over such proposals: liberal denominations and churches supporting them, conservative ones against.

It may also offer a clue into how even hardened religious positions may be softening in Kalamazoo’s current debate over gay rights.

Pastor Timothy Ezell of Mt. Calvary Christian Bible Church in Kalamazoo

Rev. Timothy Ezell’s stance on Ordinance 1856, meanwhile, is anything but soft. The pastor of Mt. Calvary Christian Bible Church recently delivered a seven-minute statement expanding on his view that the proposed ordinance is “discriminatory and intolerable.” The statement by Ezell, a member of the advisory committee of Kalamazoo Citizens Voting No to Special Rights Discrimination, the group opposing the ordinance, is prominently featured on the group’s otherwise bare-bones Web site.

“Someone’s choice of sexual behavior or a man wearing women’s clothing and demanding the right to use the women’s restroom, is not the moral or social or legal equivalency of being born with black skin,” Ezell said while discussing how the ordinance should not be thought of as an extension of any civil rights struggle. The African-American pastor of the past 23-years at Mt. Calvary then goes on to argue that the ordinance amounts to “government sponsored discrimination” and a “solution in search of a non-existing problem.”

Contacted by Michigan Messenger, Ezell criticized the television ad produced by One Kalamazoo, the group supporting Ordinance 1856. “The other side has not been truthful.”

Gay couples with or without children should not be described as “families,” he said, faulting the 30-second commercial for featuring at least one heterosexual family — father, mother, two adorable infants — but no one who’s obviously gay.

“That’s very deceptive,” he added, “to say family, and you’re a homosexual gay person and you’re promoting the traditional family of a man, woman and children. Saying ‘family,’ that does not fit.”

Pastor Matthew Laney of First Congregational Church in Kalamazoo (Photo by David Alire Garcia/Michigan Messenger)

Another local minister whose views also don’t fit into the soft category is Rev. Matthew Laney of First Congregational Church, located on the other side of Kalamazoo’s Bronson Park from Vernon’s Methodist church.

“This is going to sound sort of haughty,” the United Church of Christ minister said with a laugh sitting in his book-filled office, “but we’re kind of past this.” Of the UCC, he added: “We’ve historically been on the forefront of important social justice issues.” Laney proudly recounted just a couple of the UCC’s litany of “firsts” — the first Christian denomination to ordain women and openly gay ministers.

Laney, married and in the third year of serving his downtown congregation, is one of only two clergy on the One Kalamazoo steering committee. The opposing group lists seven ministers on its advisory committee.

“For me it’s very easy to be very public about who we are and how we express our faith particularly around inclusion of GLBT people because it’s just part of who we are as a denomination,” Laney said. He estimates that anywhere between 5 to 10 percent of his congregation is gay or lesbian. And that, he adds, has “been a blessing to us and helped us really live out why we feel the gospel is true.”

Ezell’s truth, on the other hand, is that passage of Ordinance 1856 will specifically harm women due to their possible proximity to transgender women in public bathrooms. In his statement, he spelled out that harm in the form of a question.

Should our mothers and wives and children be forced, by law … to share the woman’s restroom or showers, or locker rooms or changing rooms, with men who have their emotional and mental delusions that they are women [and] wear women’s clothing?

That, Ezell believes, violates “the privacy, comfort and sense of security of women and children in restrooms and other public facilities.”

Laney, like many in Kalamazoo these days, has heard that line of attack from opponents of the anti-discrimination ordinance many times now. But he doesn’t buy it.

“They’re really seizing on fear mongering, in my opinion, about what is going to happen to your daughter in the bathroom,” he says. “It’s ludicrous. But that’s where they’re going, which says something about what they have to stand on, which isn’t a whole lot.”

Vernon, the Methodist, is focusing less on the current campaign and more on his four decades of ministry, specifically the GLBT congregants he’s come to know over the last 20 years or so. He said he’s been particularly affected by the coming-out stories they’ve shared with him and at least one recurring detail.

“In every case, when they came out to me they told me this was not a choice, this is something they were born with — and I completely believe that,” he said. “The scriptures proclaim that we are mysteriously and wonderfully made. That’s true of all of us.”

At the heart of the religious divide, Vernon said, is a clash over biblical interpretation. But the concept of God religious people embrace is even more important, he believes.

“For me, it’s irrational to believe that God would create GLBT persons for loveless lives. That they would somehow be condemned to never be in relationships, never express their love to another person,” he said.

Vernon asked his own question: “Is our God loving and just and merciful or not?”