Equality PA’s faith initiative building bridges

Statewide LGBT advocacy organization Equality Pennsylvania is in the midst of an education and outreach initiative targeted at faith communities, which is bringing together people of faith from across the state to address and advance LGBT equality and acceptance.

Ammon Ripple, Equality PA’s statewide faith organizer and an LGBTQ activist from Pittsburgh, said the response to Equality PA’s effort has exceeded the group’s expectations.

“Over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been traveling the state looking for LGBT-affirming clergy and people of faith,” he said. “We initially thought we’d find a couple-hundred people from some of the more progressive denominations but we’ve built up the network to 700 faith leaders, and they come from more than 35 denominations. So there’s a lot of support we didn’t realize in faith communities.”

Ripple said the organization’s initiative is two-pronged: The agency helps faith communities confront challenges to LGBT acceptance within their congregations and connects those already LGBT-affirming circles with opportunities to advocate for a statewide LGBT nondiscrimination law.

“One of the things that has been important is to recognize that people are all across the board theologically on questions around human sexuality and gender identity, but they are very clear in most of the major religious traditions that discrimination is immoral,” he said. “One of the things that has been interesting was to ask them about the morality of discrimination versus the questions around sexuality and gender identity. That helps them be much more clear in their support for civil equality but a great majority are also supportive of full inclusion in their church or synagogue.”

Ripple added that Equality PA includes people from wide spectrums of faith in their outreach work.

“We have Roman Catholic lay people in our network, Evangelical folks, a few Baptist pastors and many mainline Protestant clergy from the United Methodist Church,” he said. “We have Unitarian Universalists and all of the major Jewish faiths in the network. We don’t see a lot of support from the Orthodox Jewish or Orthodox Christian communities, but we find that they are not opposed on the question of civil equality. We aren’t finding much opposition there.”

Global and religious leaders like Pope Francis starting to show support toward issues of LGBT equality and acceptance has been important, Ripple noted, although he said many people of faith had already begun moving in that direction.

“Certainly that was encouraging to many of our Catholic lay people in the network,” he said. “But they were already clear about where they stood. So some of our Catholic lay people who have gay or transgender children, they are going to visit their bishop and telling their story of why it is important to them to have a more loving stance toward LGBT people. Pope Francis’ more open stance has been encouraging to people but there is more Catholic support for LGBT inclusion thanpeople realize — but now they have just been encouraged to speak about it.”

For more information about Equality PA, visit www.equalitypa.org.  

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