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Bishop Yvette Flunder Comments on California Court's Decision
I am Bishop Yvette Flunder senior Pastor of City of Refuge UCC and I preside over an Independent group of Affirming churches throughout the US, Africa and Mexico. I am a proud UCC Pastor I am also deeply rooted in the African American Pentecostal church.
If a people were allowed to withhold the civil and inalienable rights of a minority group, and re-enforce their privilege by a simple majority vote, then African Americans would still be under the "then popular" bondage of chattel slavery and indentured servitude. As an African American woman, who has not forgotten that less than 50 years ago in the Jim Crow South, African American citizens were denied most of their civil and human rights, I know unequivocally that equal rights guaranteed to every citizen by the Constitution of the United States, and given by God, must not be subject to the will of the majority.
How should the church respond to families that don't fit the prescribed social norm of the majority? The Christian Church had a similar dilemma 200 years ago when it sought to determine how to justify the inclusion of slave families that did not fit the requirement set forth by the church or the law. The issue was how could the church receive them 'in good standing' when some of the married slaves had both their current spouses and another spouse and often other children on another plantation. Underlying this issue was the fact that slave marriages were not considered valid and legal, as slaves were not truly 'people' but possessions. How could the church make their marriages sacred if the law of their masters could force them in and out of their marriages? How could they have legal expectations of them without granting them legal rights?
One church, the Welsh Neck Baptist Church of South Carolina decided that to grant membership to the slave couples and to validate their marriage was the role of the church.
How could this church help to honor families when the majority view of church and society was against them? This bold church may not have had the opportunity to be friends of the court but they were friends of the disadvantaged and friends of God.
This forward thinking group of Christians were able to see beyond the religious legalism of their time and find a way to help these families so different from their own. They welcomed them and solemnized their marriages.
All of the movements to secure equal rights for people of African decent are deeply rooted in faith. Our leaders…Martin Luther King, Shirley Chisolm, Desmond Tutu, Fannie Lou Hamer, Jesse Jackson, and President Barack Obama were and are part of the Black church and their political positions are informed by a 'God inspired' theology of Justice for All. This is the same theology that informs me as a same gender loving AA pastor and it must undergird the decision of the Supreme Court to overturn any decision that provides majority privilege and power for some instead of justice for all. In the words of the Mother of the African American Civil Rights movement, Coretta Scott King…"Gay and Lesbian people have families, and their families (continued on page 3)
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