Lutheran Church says minister can be gay - but, not in a same-sex relationship. WTF?
Nothing like religious logic,
eh?
In 1994, when the Rev. Katrina D. Foster became pastor of Fordham
Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Bronx, she threw herself into ministering to
her small, mostly Caribbean-born congregation. She not only preached to them on
Sundays but lived in the neighborhood and showed up to support them in
everything from surgeries to legal
matters.
But Pastor Foster was keeping a secret from her congregation. She held onto it even after a woman came to live with her in the parsonage, then joined the church choir…
But in 2002, when the woman, Pamela Kallimanis, became pregnant, they knew the time had come. So Pastor Foster sat her congregants down one by one and told them that she and Ms. Kallimanis were partners and were expecting a child.
Not one person openly criticized her, she said. Instead, “they threw us the most wonderfully outrageous baby shower in the side yard next to the church,” she said. “The woman I was most anxious about telling” — the church president — “I thought she was going to leap across the table and hug me.”
Sounds like the kind of acceptance and tolerance these United States used to stand up for.
Now Pastor Foster and her roughly 100 congregants face a new challenge: the possibility that she, along with four other pastors in the New York area and 81 nationwide, could be defrocked in 2009 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The country’s largest Lutheran denomination, it allows openly gay pastors but forbids them from being in same-sex relationships…
“I think we’ve all grown because of her,” said the church president, Emilie Ramdhanie, 61, a Virgin Islands-born social worker. “She’s made us a lot more aware of what it means to be gay and have a full life like anyone else.”…
I think the bigots who clutch their prejudice as some religious commandment - would be just as bigoted within any other philosophical framework. Rationale, excuse - whatever. It still stinks.
But Pastor Foster was keeping a secret from her congregation. She held onto it even after a woman came to live with her in the parsonage, then joined the church choir…
But in 2002, when the woman, Pamela Kallimanis, became pregnant, they knew the time had come. So Pastor Foster sat her congregants down one by one and told them that she and Ms. Kallimanis were partners and were expecting a child.
Not one person openly criticized her, she said. Instead, “they threw us the most wonderfully outrageous baby shower in the side yard next to the church,” she said. “The woman I was most anxious about telling” — the church president — “I thought she was going to leap across the table and hug me.”
Sounds like the kind of acceptance and tolerance these United States used to stand up for.
Now Pastor Foster and her roughly 100 congregants face a new challenge: the possibility that she, along with four other pastors in the New York area and 81 nationwide, could be defrocked in 2009 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The country’s largest Lutheran denomination, it allows openly gay pastors but forbids them from being in same-sex relationships…
“I think we’ve all grown because of her,” said the church president, Emilie Ramdhanie, 61, a Virgin Islands-born social worker. “She’s made us a lot more aware of what it means to be gay and have a full life like anyone else.”…
I think the bigots who clutch their prejudice as some religious commandment - would be just as bigoted within any other philosophical framework. Rationale, excuse - whatever. It still stinks.
Posted: Sun - November 25, 2007 at 07:51 AM