Writings

I presented a petition to the 2023 Mountain Sky Conference asking our General Conference delegates to remove all the language that was harmful to LGBTQ persons. Here's the petition. Here are my remarks:

I’m Ben Roe, lay member from Arvada UMC in Colorado; pronouns he/him.

I’ve been interested in human sexuality nearly all my life. I noticed it was not to be talked about and was surrounded by mystery and taboo. So, I was curious. I talked my preacher dad into offering the old Sex and the Whole Person course to us in MYF. I wrote about sexuality in seminary and taught human sexuality in community college. And when I was 31, it got a lot more personal as I realized I didn’t fit into the binary dichotomy of heterosexual-homosexual.

In 1972, the church began a 50-year process of condemning so-called “homosexual” behavior, prohibiting any expenditure that would promote the acceptance of it, prohibiting anyone who identified as “homosexual” to be a minister, and prohibiting same-sex marriage.

This has caused harm to many, many individuals and families, who felt unwelcome, rejected for who they or their kids had come to understand themselves to be, had their Christian faith questioned, and barred from professional ministry.

Sex is far more complex than the binaries of male-female, gay-straight. Just in the biology of sex, there are six markers of human sex, and each one is a continuum! There are continua of sex chromosomes, hormones, external genitals, internal sexual organs, gonad tissue, and even brain structure! Over the years, I learned about and met real human beings whose experience of gender and sexuality didn't fit the binary categories and all the cultural constructions which are built up around these binaries.

And these were Christian believers, who shared a faith journey much like mine, with questions, discoveries, and commitments of faith a lot like mine.

Along with all these discoveries about sexuality, I was discovering how large God is, that God could actually create complexity like this, and call it good--even delight in it!--that God could delight in the meanings that God's human creatures were creating out of it, and delight in the relationship that God could have with each one in a Divine relationship! It seemed that Jesus was quite OK with the diversity around him of human beings who were trying their best, even when they were racked by "leprosy," disabilities, social exclusion and guilt. He reached out to each one and challenged them to go deeper in their relationship with God.

Let's help our United Methodist Church embrace the complexity that God has created and is creating in human sexuality. Let's reach out like Jesus did to welcome, celebrate, and invite into a deeper relationship with the Divine. Let’s remove the barriers we’ve erected to God’s grace and creativity over these last 50 years! This petition would do that.

A young couple spoke in support of it, but wondered what the connection was between sex and spirituality. I was caught off guard by the question, and didn't have a good response. I gave them this link as my best attempt at an answer.

A trans woman who had spoken passionately earlier in the day why this was necessary and offered a prayer, spoke in support as well, reiterating much of her earlier points.

It received 96% support. This shows how far we've come in this conference in nearly 50 years since Julian Rush came out in the 1980s and the conference dealt with him and our bishop at the time, Mel Wheatley. When we first came to Denver in 1988, we discovered that no one wanted to talk about it. It was too fresh and too painful. Over the next few years, I submitted petitions affirming LGBTQ persons. Read more about these here. By the time I began that series, they all passed, sometimes with some passionate opposition.

Resources and documentation for the speech: