Christian Century describes the work of the Rev. Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church and a former Pentecostal minister, who worked over four decades to establish legal and religious rights for gays and lesbians before the California Supreme Court decided to give the “right to marry” to same-sex couples.
The idea of legal marriage for gays was too politically volatile in the mid-1990s for the MCC to make it a priority issue. But by early 2001, Perry and his church were fully committed to the fight. Perry and his longtime partner, Phillip Ray De Blieck, were legally married July 16, 2003, at an MCC congregation in Toronto.
“Today the California Supreme Court legally recognized our marriage,” Perry, 67 and now retired, exulted on May 15, saying that “our marriage is equal in the eyes of the law to all other marriages.”
A sociologist of religion who has studied the MCC movement credited Perry’s leadership for the changes. “He has had the audacity and the tenacity to claim for gay and lesbian people the religious and civil rights that most Americans have the privilege to take for granted,” said Steven Warner, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago and immediate past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Warner said the movement led by Perry was “reformist” in seeking change and “conservative” in affirming the value of “two conservative institutions—the church and marriage.” Many people in the gay community say “nuts to marriage” and reject all churches as homophobic, he said. But Perry and other plaintiffs “don’t want to overthrow marriage; they want to be part of it.”
While the recent California Supreme Court ruling opens the way for marriage for gay and lesbians, the issue is not resolved as opposing groups seek to change California’s constitution.
Churches are not required in the ruling to perform same-sex unions, but each denomination will have to figure out how to apply their teachings in light of it. Some denominations came out four-square against the ruling, such as the Roman Catholic Bishops in the state. Others are finding ways to implement it.
The United Church of Christ, which joined a brief in the California case, approved overwhelmingly in its 2005 convention a resolution supporting legalization of same-sex marriages. Bill McKinney, president of the UCC-related Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, said the seminary “celebrates this historic decision.”
Episcopal priest Susan Russell, the national president of the gay-advocacy group Integrity, indicated that supporters for gay union rites should raise these issues at the 2009 triennial Episcopal General Convention in Anaheim, California. She told Episcopal News Service that it is time for the church to “be as prophetic as the state of California has been.”
Bishop Jon Bruno, who heads the Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese, said the court decision resonates with the church’s baptismal vows to strive for justice and respect for all. “To paraphrase St. Paul,” Bruno said in a May 15 statement, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, gay nor straight in Jesus Christ our Lord.”
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