Roseville Clergy Spar At Same-Sex Marriage Forum

Roseville area clergy sparred over the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage Monday evening at a St. Michael's Lutheran Church forum hosted by the Roseville Human Rights Commission.

About 35 community members listened as clergy members from St. Michael’s, Rose Hill Alliance Church, Arlington Hills United Methodist and Roseville Baptist Church  shared their personal views on the issue.

Jackie Hill, the new pastor at Roseville Baptist, was the only one of the panelists to advance a strong stance in favor of the proposed amendment.

“God defined a marriage as between a man and a woman,” he said. “Even though I understand the importance of separation of church and state, I cannot detach my biblical views from the way that I vote.”

In his introductory remarks, Roland Hayes, the St. Michael’s pastor, spoke about officiating at a same-sex wedding in Iowa for a female congregant he knew since she was two years old.

Hayes said he did not believe that the biblical passage about marriage (Mark 10:8) that “the two will become one flesh” precluded an “essential connectedness” between two people of the same sex.

“I feel at one with my wife when we have sexual relations but I also feel at one with my wife when we share our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our doubts,” Hayes said.

Chip Nielsen, the pastor of Arlington Hills United Methodist Church, said that while he does not perform same-sex marriages, he would be voting against the amendment.

“I do think the civil rights issues are very important,” Nielsen said. “I’m a firm believer in the separation of church and state.”

The Rev. David Smith of Rose Hill Alliance Church did not specifically state how he would vote on the ballot amendment, but he said he did believe there was “a theology that allows gays to marry politically.”

And Smith spoke about the proliferation of divorce, promiscuity and out-of-wedlock pregnancy in contemporary society.

“My struggle is: Why are we spending millions of dollars when many in our culture don’t think marriage is important anyway?” Smith asked. “Here’s the irony to me: Gay and lesbian couples want to be married because they have a higher view of marriage than the rest of our society.”

In the question-and-answer period, in which moderator Kristin Klamm-Doneen read audience questions off notecards, Hill and Smith disagreed repeatedly on points including whether the Bible is the literal word of God (Hill: “The bible is the most historically accurate book that we have.”) and whether you can disagree with the constitutional amendment without disagreeing with God (Hill: “I can’t distinguish between the two.”)

In response to a question about the difference between Muslims lobbying for Sharia law and Christian supporters of the amendment seeking to enshrine their religious beliefs in law, Hill said that the “biggest difference in our country is that our laws are derived from the Bible.”

“One would be God’s word, the other would not be,” he said. “One is a man-made book, one is God-ordained.”

Hayes repeatedly told Hill that “I don’t agree with your interpretation of scripture,” claiming that “we have done some terrible things based on what the Bible says”—citing the Crusades, the Third Reich and the outlawing of interracial marriage.

Hill responded, “All those things have been taken out of context.”

Throughout the forum, Hill returned, colorfully, to the metaphor of a buffet, comparing his proclivity for “gluttony” with the tendency of some people to indulge their desires for homosexual relations. But in response to an audience question, he said he did not believe gluttony should be made illegal.

“I can go to a buffet and not overeat and therefore not sin, but you cannot have homosexual relations without there being sin,” he said.

One compromise that Hill and Hayes agreed on was to eliminate marriage as a legal designation and replace it with a form of “civil union” for both hetero- and homosexual couples.

The forum’s moderator, Kristin Klamm-Doneen, said that organizers made a conscious choice to only include clergy members from Christian faiths.

“If we were to have one Christian and one imam and one rabbi, that could do more harm then good in terms of modeling plurality, because one person doesn’t necessarily speak for an entire religion,” she said.