I know. I have two diaries to write for Friday: a US since 1865 diary about Watergate and a Top Comments diary. But since I wrote one diary on this already, this article about a Methodist minister of some note finding himself in trouble because he officiated at the wedding of his own son struck me as being worthy of note and of some analysis. Below the great orange platen, please.
It seems that the Reverend Dr. Thomas W. Ogletree, Frederick Marquand Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Religious Studies at Yale Divinity School, has five children, two of whom are gay. His daughter married in a non-Methodist ceremony. His son, Thomas R. Ogletree, asked his father to preside at his wedding, and so he did. So now, Dr. Ogletree is under fire from several New York UMC ministers for violating church rules.
But there's more to this. Dr. Ogletree is also a veteran of the civil rights struggle of midcentury and a scholar concerned with the very issues involved in this case. As he told Sharon Otterman of the Times:
Sometimes, when what is officially the law is wrong, you try to get the law changed,” Dr. Ogletree, a native of Birmingham, Ala., said in a courtly Southern drawl over a recent lunch at Yale . . . “But if you can’t, you break it.
Yes, this is most certainly a veteran of the civil rights struggle.
It seems that Ogletree was also able to face his main accuser, the Rev. Randall C. Paige, pastor of Christ Church in Port Jefferson Station, N.Y. Ogletree reports that he told Rev. Paige
I said, this is an unjust law. Dr. King broke the law. Jesus of Nazareth broke the law; he drove the money changers out of the temple. So you mean you should never break any law, no matter how unjust it is?
Paige's response? No comment, and Otterman reports that he declined to comment because the proceedings are supposed to be confidential. Gee, it seems to me Dr. Ogletree broke the seal on the confidentiality, and the article cites other accusers of Ogletree saying things like this:
Reverend Ogletree is acting in a way that is injurious to the church, because it fosters confusion in the church about what we stand for.
Declines to comment? Would prefer not to be seen as a bigot is more like it.
So we rehearse the contention about homosexuality in the Methodist Church of the United States, and we learn that the reconciling Methodists have a new organization: Methodists in New Directions (Dr. Ogletree's case is on the front page of the website). Never mind that, says the region's bishop, Martin D. McLee. His position?
If everyone can pick and choose the laws that they don’t particularly like, and choose to violate them, then you have a situation of pandemonium.
He's likely to have a problem. Ogletree's case, he says, is the first one of its type that has come before him, although 208 ministers in his bishopric say they're willing to perform weddings in their churches.
In the 1840s, many of the big Protestant denominations in the United States (the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Baptists) split into Northern and Southern divisions based on where their ministers stood on the issue of slavery. The Baptists STILL have a Southern Division amidst a number of Northern and National conventions.. The Presbyterians didn't solve their Northern/Southern issues until 1983. The Methodists don't refer to any split at their website, but it turns out that they have disciplined some of their ministers for performing same-sex union ceremonies.
In the past, the Methodist denomination has punished pastors for officiating at same-sex weddings. When the Rev. Jimmy Creech, a Nebraska pastor, was found guilty in a 1999 church trial of performing at gay weddings, he was defrocked. In 2011, the Rev. Amy DeLong received a 20-day suspension for marrying a lesbian couple.
So there will be a symbolic church trial of a man who has already retired from his ministry. At least some Methodists will be upset by the outcome. I'm expecting the rules will be upheld, and I'm also afraid that the people who brought the case and the people who uphold the rules will be seen as bigots. I can't muster up a whole lot of sympathy for them.