In Facebook I recently joined the group Reaching Out to the Religious Community on Prop 8. The creator of the site is trying to create a postcard writing campaign to persuade Reverend Rick Warren to have a dialogue with the California Faith for Equality, a group of churches dedicated to healing the rift between the faith community and the LGBT community. Dan wrote on a Progressive Christian site,

"I am with Marriage Equality Silicon Valley and one of the ideas we discussed was a scrapbook filled with pictures and photos of the married couples who have been affected by Proposition 8. That idea has been the inspiration behind the slide show, “Please Don’t Divorce Us.” My idea is to take that and to make photos into postcards in order to send to Reverend Warren in order to personalize our stories and to show that real people in real, committed relationships are being hurt by the actions of the faith communities who support banning gay marriage. We in the LGBT community have been stereotyped as promiscuous and uncommitted, which is ironic, because many of us have committed to the person we love. As stereotypes die hard, perhaps it is time to get in their faces once and for all, not with letters in the various newspapers, but to tell our stories to the other side. On the back we would ask them to meet with California Faith for Equality in a neutral place for a dialogue to discuss how we could preserve freedom for all. Angelo has discussed if this method is successful, expanding it to the Catholic bishops of California and even the Mormon Church.

Those who do not have access to the postcards from the slide show or want to show their alliance with the community could get various cards from their places of worship and write down the same message. The message we have to send is that they are people who deserve all the rights that heterosexual couples enjoy and that in order to make progress, we have to dispel the dehumanization and the stereotypes that we face. Perhaps these postcards can be a way to humanize us in the eyes of those who oppose gay marriage for whatsoever reason.

This does not have to be a LGBT community exclusive campaign. We need the support of our beloved straight allies and those in the faith community. Perhaps straight allies can talk about how their friends have been affected by the whole Proposition 8 campaign. Perhaps pastors can talk about if they support gay marriage, how their rights to practice their own religious beliefs are being infringed by the proposition. In doing so, we can provide a show of solidarity from all corners and not give gay marriage opponents the talking point that this is just another gay campaign that they can ignore."

Here is the address of Rick Warren's church and a website if you want to mail the postcards or email on having a dialogue with California Faith for Equality in a neutral site. The address of his church is 232 Avenida Fabricante suite 101 San Clemente, CA 92672 and you can contact his church at www.saddleback.com.

I believe that even within conservative Christians churches, there are Christians who are either gay or lesbian or who support gay rights who keep quiet out of fear or intimidation. During the mid 1990s I went to an Evangelical church and during that time a teenage girl went out of the closet. A few church members were very supportive of her and were kind to her and tried to shield her. But there were also many who said the cruelest things about her behind her back. During that time I had conversations with individual church members who had gay and lesbian friends and family members and they talked about how angry they felt at how their loved ones were treated. Yet when we were in a larger church setting, they would keep quiet when they heard bad things being said against gays and lesbians. If we can get a dialogue inside these churches, where these quiet Christians can see that they're not alone in their beliefs, maybe they will get the courage to speak out and challenge their fellow churchgoers.

I have a wordpress blog where someone wrote back to me and said:

"Whilst I support your stance against religious persecution (which is what prop 8 actually is: persecution of people on religious grounds) the fact that you permit right wing radicals to usurp your agenda is essentially a cop out allowing your principles to be compromised. So what value does your faith have if you don’t protect it.

If you don’t stand up then you acquiesce. If you allow the so called conservatives to dominate, you actively support your religion’s values being besmirched and rendered irrelevant."

His comment really affected me. I heard it echoed by many gay and lesbian friends who had bad experiences with Christians. With the growing antagonism between the Christian Church and the LGBT Community, I think Progressive Christians have a responsibility to try to get a dialogue inside those conservative churches and give a strong religious argument for gay rights. If a lot of prejudice against gays and lesbians comes from the church, then it's in the LGBT community's interests to have sympathetic Christians argue for gay rights inside these churches. I wrote a post on Christian gay rights groups that gay and lesbian Catholics, Mormons, and Evangelicals and their straight supporters can go to for information and support.

Dan is right that a dialogue is needed. The Christian Century's January 27, 2009 issue has an editiorial on Reverand Warren and Obama. It wrote:

"Indeed, in the case of several of Warren's stances- homosexuality as unequivocally wrong, abortion as a 'holocaust', U.S. power as a divine instrument for punishing evildoers- the pastor would learn a lot from some sustained civil discourse with those who disagree with him.

But that, we take it, was the point of Obama's invitation: to keep the conversation going. The invitation to Warren was consistent with Obama's longstanding effort to call a truce in the culture war, or at least to lower the intensity of the conflict.

The problem with the culture war is not that it is wrong to fight for one's beliefs. Rather, the culture war is a problem because in an all-out war, opponents become enemies to be defeated at all costs. In a war there is little incentive to search for middle ground or to make alliances on other issues.

The culture was has been especially debilitating to Christians, who make the unusual claim that those united with Christ are also united with each other in Christ's body, the church. If that is what the church is, then Christians will always encounter in the church people with whom they disagree- but are bound to keep talking to."