Red State Religions: The Religious Fight for Same Sex Marriage in Alabama
In the first episode of 'Red State Religions,' host Dr. Gillian Frank explores the progressive religious communities in conservative areas, focusing on the Unitarian Universalist ministers and LGBTQ couples who participated in same-sex marriage ceremonies in Birmingham, Alabama. The episode highlights Reverend Luna Jensen Boad's and Reverend Lne Broussard's roles in these historic events, detailing the political and religious struggles leading to and following the legalization of same-sex marriage. Personal stories from Kay and Andrew illustrate the impact of finding liberal religious spaces in a conservative environment. The episode examines the intersection of faith and social justice, unraveling the complex history of marriage equality and the enduring presence of liberal religion in the Bible Belt.
00:00 Introduction to Red State Religions
00:51 A Historic Day in Alabama
05:30 The Path to Marriage Equality
15:53 Personal Stories of Love and Struggle
25:27 Finding Community in Unitarian Universalism
33:10 Conclusion and Next Episode Preview
Red State Religions is produced by the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement with generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Created by Dr. Gillian Frank
Producer: Andrew Gill
Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi
Audio Engineer and Music: R. Scott Okamoto
Production Assistance: Kari Onishi
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One thing I know that we can never separate ourselves into the saved and unsaved.
My full name is Luna Jensen Broussard.
And I'm a retired Unitarian Universalist minister.
And in all my ministry, from the very beginning, I've always done same-sex marriages.
I never thought this would happen.
I was so happy that it did.
Of course, then it took a while before Alabama allowed it to happen.
And on the day it happened, I went down there in full regalia.
And people could come up and ask me to do a wedding.
On February 9, 2015, six months before the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, the Reverend Lone Broussard and her assistant minister, Gail Stratton, stood outside the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama.
A district court judge had overturned Alabama's ban on same-sex marriage, and the two ministers, with the support of their congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, came to bless the occasion.
I'm married now!
Claps and cheers of support greeted every couple as they walked through the Jefferson County Courthouse doors Monday morning.
Photographers offered to take pictures for free.
That's what you'll remember and that's what you'll share is you were part of a little bit of history right here in the Magic City.
The mood was festive as members of the LGBTQ community and the people who loved them converged at Linn Park outside of the courthouse.
Some waved rainbow flags.
Many carried large rainbow posters emblazoned with the word CELEBRATE.
Others held homemade signs with slogans like LOVE WINS!
And a number of groups, including the National Organization for Women, handed out cupcakes to the many couples getting married.
Despite this outpouring of love, the events that led to and followed that day were filled with conflict.
The path toward Lin Park was shaped by the powerful political Then there are those who are wanting the special right to marry who they love.
But true marriage is not based on love, especially the perverted love.
True marriage is when a man and a woman join to become one.
Then God commands a man to love his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it.
These hostile and very loud religious voices were part of the story, however are not our focus today.
Our story focuses on the quieter religious voices that are too often overlooked.
Our emphasis is on the Unitarian Universalist ministers who felt compelled to be there, and the people of faith who felt compelled Welcome
Welcome to Red State Religions, a limited series podcast exploring liberal religion in conservative spaces.
My name is Gillian Frank.
In this and subsequent episodes, we will be exploring the many perforations in the silver
The term Bible Belt In Bible Belt
States, known for electing self-proclaimed religious and conservative politicians, faith is thoroughly entangled in progressive causes.
In centering liberal religion in red states, we can begin to dignify The ways in which people of faith, people who are often overlooked and ignored, live out their convictions and shape their communities.
These stories are all the more urgent at a moment of heightened Christian nationalism and a full-scale attack by politicians on the racial diversity and gender and sexual variance that is part of the fabric of religious and public life in the United States.
Outro Music.
Marriage is much more than love, intimacy, and commitment between two people.
It is a public vow, literally requiring witnesses and state sanction.
Historian Nancy Cott describes marriage as an institution that dignifies and solemnizes some relationships but not others.
It is, she explains, part of the public order, shaping one's standing in the community, one's standing in the state, and even one's self-understanding.
In ways subtle and explicit, marriage connects the government to the home through hundreds upon hundreds of policies that range from taxes to immigration.
And all the while, religious institutions affirm that marriage is more than just two people formalizing a relationship.
It is a communal affair that is blessed by religious officiants and made public through ceremonies and acts like the ringing of wedding bells.
The debate over gay marriage feels recent and its enshrinement into law sudden, especially in the Bible Belt.
But the path to same-sex nuptials at Linn Park in Birmingham, Alabama stretches back to the early 1970s.
In the upsurge of activism that characterized the gay liberation movement, some gay and lesbian couples I'm Brad Davis.
And I'm John Sablone.
George and John are being married in Hartford's gay church, the Metropolitan Community Church.
George and John are homosexuals, members of a minority group that has been persecuted and despised throughout history.
A minority group that has, until now, hidden itself from society.
Tonight, and next Saturday night on What's Happening, we will look at the gay life, beginning with the union of George and John.
Bless, O Lord, these rings, that those who wear them faithfully may abide in your peace.
More often than not, these efforts were unsuccessful, with county clerks refusing to issue licenses, and courts affirming their exclusion of same-sex couples.
There were, however, some exceptions.
In 1975 in Colorado Springs, a county clerk issued a marriage license to a gay couple.
So I took office, and three months after I had been sworn in, two guys from Colorado Springs came into my office.
And they had gone to the county clerk in Colorado Springs to ask for a marriage license.
They had a legal reason.
They wanted to qualify for the Homestead Act, which I can't profess to understand really, but it had to do with acquiring land through some government program.
And that was their reason for wanting to get married.
They were both named Dave.
I issued that license based really on one premise, other than, of course, the fact it was not illegal.
I was a feminist asking for equal rights and I felt very deeply who was I to deny equal rights to someone else who was asking for the same.
And that was pretty much at the core of all of it and why I made the decision to issue those licenses.
Their marriage, and five more after that, We're officially recorded by the clerk, marking the first time in American history that same-sex marriages had been certified.
A public outcry from conservative religious leaders and politicians soon stopped clerks from issuing licenses.
But these vocal objections were not the whole story.
Five of the six same-sex licensed weddings were performed by ministers of mainline Protestant denominations.
The fact that ministers in the 1970s blessed these unions was part of, rather than apart from, shifting theologies of sexuality in mainline Protestant thought and activism.
The idea that religious support for gay people is a recent phenomena is clearly not true.
Throughout the 1960s, gay rights activists forged alliances with church leaders from Episcopal, Methodist, and UCC denominations, among others.
What's more, As historian Heather White has shown, gay and lesbian activists were themselves people of faith.
Not only did their dialogue with religious leaders help shift denominational views on same-sex sexuality, gays and lesbians also formed their own religious organizations, and within them began performing ceremonies called holy unions and services of friendship in order to honor their relationships.
Over time, Growing numbers of religious leaders treated gays and lesbians not as sinners or deviants, but as people to be welcomed into the fold.
People whose love should be dignified.
By the end of the 1970s, more progressive ministers, some of whom were gay themselves, affirmed same-sex relationships by officiating their unions.
Early efforts by gay and lesbians to get married caught the attention of conservative activists, especially opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was a proposed constitutional amendment that would have prohibited against sex discrimination.
It passed Congress in 1972, but still needed to be ratified by 38 states in order to take effect.
Over the next decade, state-level battles over the ratification of the ERA became debates over different visions of sexual and gender norms.
But I get fed up with the women's liberationists running down motherhood and saying that it's a menial, degrading career and that the home is a prison from which women should be liberated and brought out into this wonderful workforce.
Now the home is the most fulfilling place for most women.
For ERA supporters, the amendment was an opportunity to affirm women's equal protection under the law.
However, for conservatives, Often coming from evangelical, Mormon, and Catholic traditions, the ERA stood for sexual chaos.
They claimed that the ERA was, in their words, a vicious scheme to do away with the American home, and that it would permit abortion on demand, mandate co-ed bathrooms, and legalize gay marriage.
After these groups mobilized, the ERA failed to reach the ratification threshold.
More than this, in some states, Legislatures linked their repudiation of the ERA with new bans on same-sex unions.
In the 1980s and 1990s, gay and lesbian activists continued to seek legal protections for their relationships.
Well, in this country, separate has never been equal, and what civil unions does is create a separate system just for one class of people, gay people.
We don't need two lines at the town clerk's office, one for them and one for us.
I think that Connecticut has These demands for recognition were much more than symbolic.
They meant, among other things, having a right to care for and make decisions about a partner's health care, to have visitation rights in a hospital, To be recognized as a family, and as a parent, to have inheritance rights, and so much more.
By 1993, their efforts had succeeded in over 126 American cities and counties.
These jurisdictions had passed anti-discrimination statutes that recognized same-sex partnerships.
Some of these statutes gave same-sex couples some marital benefits, The 1993 march on Washington for lesbian, gay, and bi equal rights and liberation was a very loud knock on the door of Washington's power elite.
However, with the exception of a couple of select metro areas, most southern states had few such protections in place for LGBTQ people.
These slowly expanding LGBTQ rights on the state level would soon lead to national struggles that would be fought in the courts and in legislatures, at the ballot box, as well as in pews.
In 1993, Hawaii's highest court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage may violate that state constitution's equal protection clause.
The case in Hawaii begins to create a climate of opinion that other judges will learn from and will lead to some of them rethinking the way they have conceptualized marriage.
And I feel fairly certain that over the next few years, as this plays itself out in other states, we will find other judges affirming the reasoning and the rationale of Judge Chang in Hawaii.
This didn't make same-sex marriage legal in Hawaii, but it did open the door for court challenges from activists.
This legal breakthrough focused an already vigorous anti-gay movement.
Evangelicals and conservative Catholics started a national campaign against same-sex marriage rights.
They argued that legalizing same-sex marriage would, in their words, In fact, it is pricely the critics of H.R. 3396 who are demanding that homosexuality be considered as just another lifestyle.
Now, these are the people who seek to force their agenda upon the vast majority of Americans who reject the homosexual lifestyle.
Indeed, Mr. President, the bill that will be pending tomorrow morning, the Defense of Marriage Act, will safeguard the sacred institutions of marriage and the family from those who seek to destroy them and who are willing to tear apart America's moral fabric in the process.
By 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, called DOMA, and President Bill Clinton Signed it into law.
DOMA denied same-sex couples federal marriage benefits.
State-level DOMAs enacted in 37 states in the 1990s and early 2000s further defined marriage as a heterosexual institution and excluded same-sex couples from accessing marital benefits.
Not only did such laws mean that states wouldn't recognize couples' relationships with each other, Doma has often stated that non-biological parents did not have legal relationships with the child being raised by these same-sex couples.
The early 2000s saw a concerted push for marriage rights as an expression of gay rights.
The movement was met with significant victories and even greater backlash.
The legalization of same-sex partnerships in Vermont and Massachusetts The Supreme Court decision and marriage equality victories in northern states stoked efforts to prevent gay marriage from becoming a national reality.
President George W. Bush announced his opposition to same-sex marriage, while the House introduced a constitutional amendment Marriage is the most enduring and important human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith.
Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.
Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious, and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society.
Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.
This constitutional amendment ultimately failed, but it spoke to the ways in which conservative politicians and activists rallied around anti-gay causes, especially in the Bible Belt.
After Massachusetts recognized same-sex partnerships, 17 more states banned same-sex marriage, bringing the total states with bans to 40. One of these states was Alabama, where voters in 2006 approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage by a 4-to-1 margin.
It seems incredible then that just nine years later, two Unitarian Universalist ministers would officiate same-sex weddings in Birmingham, Alabama.
Music But who were these people in Lynn Park celebrating gay marriage in 2015?
And how did they fit into a state that had voted to ban same-sex marriage in a landslide in 2006?
you My name is Linda K. Emfinger.
My preferred name is K. And I got married in 2015 at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama to my spouse, Shannon Parks.
And we actually have been together for 38 years.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a small southern town, Tallassee, Alabama.
It's a one red light town of less than 5,000 people.
It's about 30 miles away from the capital of Alabama, which is Montgomery.
Aside from having one stoplight, what was the town like?
The town was a textile mill town.
And my father was a small business owner.
He owned a vending and distributing company.
And my mom was a teacher in the local school system, and all of my family lived on one street, so it was just a very small community where everyone knew everyone.
My graduating high school class had 97 people in it, and I went all the way K through 12 with those 97 people.
So everyone knew everyone's business, everyone knew everyone's name.
Yes. What was religious life like in that town?
A church on every corner, and they were all Christian.
So I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, but there were probably 12 Baptist churches.
But I grew up in the biggest church, the First Baptist church.
But there were Baptists, Methodists, no Episcopal at that point.
There is one now, Catholic church, one Catholic church, holiness, church of God.
But the two main big churches in town were a Baptist church and a Methodist church.
Growing up Baptist, what messages did you receive about family and sexuality?
You know, it's interesting because the...
Church I grew up in was somewhat, I won't say it was liberal, it was moderate, and had the same minister my entire life.
So it was that particular leader who I would say was a more moderate Southern Baptist.
But there was no, you know, familial variety.
Everyone, it was all two-parent, heterosexual families.
Pretty much.
The odd divorced mom here or there, but it was a very, you know, traditional orient background.
There wasn't really any, like, preaching against homosexuality.
It just wasn't talked about, period.
I mean, this is a time before internet, before cell phones.
Those things didn't happen until my late, until my 30s, you know, or my late 20s.
So, life was very different as far as information.
You mentioned sort of the information economy, if you will, of what was spoken about and what wasn't spoken about, and you said nobody was really talking about it.
So, do you remember how you first heard about gay or lesbian people?
Interestingly, I had when I was about I was at my cousin's house and we didn't really talk.
This was more of a gender role, more than a lesbian.
Uh-huh.
But my older cousin and I were, it was Christmas and we were standing in her room talking about growing up and we were going to be, you know, Moms and and she said well, you know, you don't she was three years older She said,
you know, you don't have to to grow up and be a mom You don't have to grow up and get married and that was kind of my first aha so we were waiting on her aunt to come from Florida and her aunt was not married and her aunt lived with another woman and They were probably gay They were probably lesbian.
They lived together for 70 years.
They died in their 90s.
They went to Tallacy High School together.
They went off to nursing school together.
They joined the WACs in World War II together.
So the chances are that they were lesbian.
They came back from World War II and moved to Lakeland, Florida, where they were both nurses.
So, on this particular day, we were waiting for them, or for my cousin, Carolyn, to arrive.
And so, my cousin was saying, so, Carolyn's not married.
We don't have to grow up and get married.
Carolyn and Marjorie are both nurses.
They both have careers.
That was one of the first Aha's about women and women's roles.
It wasn't necessarily about lesbians.
*music*
Unlike racial or religious minorities, people who have same-sex desires are usually not born into families or communities who share their affections.
They have to forge these bonds themselves.
Because of where Kay grew up in Alabama, she had to navigate the process of coming out against the backdrop of long-standing religious prejudices that caused same-sex sexuality to be shrouded in secrecy and shame.
Coming out, it's not a singular event, and coming out to yourself is actually the first step.
So for me, coming out to myself was the first step.
And coming out to a few friends, realizing that for me, as a teacher of young children, I was not able to be out.
I was very closeted.
I could have been fired on the spot.
Until very recently in this state.
And actually, in this state, you can get married on Friday and fired on Monday.
There are no job protections.
How does it feel for those who might not have experienced this to hide your full self in public settings at work?
It's very stressful to not be able to share that part of you.
To be able to share Who your friends are or in you straight people take that for granted That that they can have their you know family pictures in their offices that was not something that I could ever do as an elementary school teacher and my spouse as She worked for the Alabama State Department of Education and
that was not part of What we could do and just an example of how stressful it is.
To stay in my body.
I had to get a massage at least once a month.
Because my stress level was so high when I left.
Public school teaching and went to a university that was the 1st in the state to have a nondiscrimination hiring policy.
And so I could be out.
I immediately.
Went from physically being a stressed muscle mass to only having to get a massage about once every six months instead of once a month.
So that's just how much my body was holding.
And then your body knows.
The body knows the truth and the body held all of that.
So, I was very closeted throughout my 18 years of teaching in public schools.
It wasn't until I moved to the university setting that I was able to be out professionally.
Now, I was out personally and had lots of LGBT friends and a good social support network and was out to Some members of my family, it was much later to be out to my parents.
I think my parents were, they had more of a problem with me being Unitarian than they did with me being gay because they were afraid that I would not be in heaven with them.
So for them, that was the hard, hard piece was me being Unitarian and rejecting my religion of origin.
music In Alabama, there are less than a dozen Unitarian Universalist churches.
UUs often travel great distances to find fellowship.
Kay describes UU congregations as beacons of liberal religion in a conservative state that is becoming more conservative every year.
For Kay, coming out as a lesbian, building a lasting relationship, and becoming a Unitarian were deeply intertwined.
When I met my spouse, we became Unitarian together.
That was a place of acceptance and of support.
And we actually moved to Auburn, Alabama, which is a small university town about 30 miles away from Tallassee, where we were teaching.
And it was a very welcoming place for us.
I mean, to go somewhere in a public space that you could be yourself and be out and you could reach over and hold your spouse's hand while singing a hymn.
Just being able to be yourself when you couldn't be, you know, the other six days a week.
We had a friend who invited us She was a member of the church, and when we got there, we were smitten.
It was a place that emboldened our joint personal, individual, spiritual beliefs.
We were very active because we had At last found a spiritual home.
It was a place where we got involved in feminist approaches to religion and enjoyed very many women's spirit type of activities.
So it was a great aha for both of us to find that.
We had both rejected our religion of our family of origin.
But we didn't know what else was out there.
And it wasn't until we were talking with a friend who was a lesbian, who was a member of that church, and she cited it as a place that we could construct our own theology, that multiple theologies were welcomed and affirmed.
Neither of us had any idea that Unitarian Universalism was out there.
We had never heard about it.
It felt like what we had been looking for it fit within our personal philosophies that the justice the social justice aspect of you you is and the acceptance of one another and Being searching for meaning and truth and a moral Consciousness and
the democratic Participation in a religious community can ebb and flow.
Often, one's phase of life drives this engagement.
Kay and her spouse My name is Andrew Duxbury, and I am currently resident in Birmingham, Alabama, where I have been for the last 25 and a half years.
I belong to the UU Church of Birmingham and have been an official member since 2000.
If having a child drew Kay and her partner to the UU congregation in Birmingham, illness and mourning made it a home for Andrew.
Steve and I moved to Birmingham, Alabama with a lot of trepidation.
Everybody we knew in California said, Alabama, you're out of your friggin' minds.
After he got sick, But while he was still doing relatively well, we looked at each other and realized, we've lived here about a year, we have almost no friends in town, our support system is two and a half thousand miles away, you know, we've got to do something.
We'd figured out enough about Birmingham to know that it is a town where social circles center around church.
And We had a little bit of religious life between the two of us in California.
We had gone occasionally to the UU Church in Sacramento, and Steve had gone fairly frequently to the Sacramento Metropolitan Community Church, which was founded by Troy Perry specifically as a church for gay and lesbian people.
And Steve was something of a minor celebrity in MCC circles because he was one of the 12 apostles.
He was one of the 12 people who was at the very first MCC meeting in Troy Perry's living room.
Because they had connections with the Metropolitan Community Church, which first met in Troy Perry's living room in 1968, Andrew and Steve sought to make that congregation their home.
It seemed like a natural fit.
It was a gay church for gay people.
But sexual identity is only part of the story of religious belonging.
We found the local MCC church to basically be a Southern Baptist church with gay people, and while they tried to help with putting together a care team, it did not take too long for, I don't remember who it was, but some righteous queen to show up to help him one day, and he was frustrated about something, and he was using four-letter words, and the righteous queen looked at him and said, Oh, we don't use language like that!
To which Steve said, it's my house, I'm dying, I'll use any bloody words I want.
And the Righteous Queen's hair stood on end, and he was horrified, and off he went.
So we knew this is not going to work out.
So Steve looked around a bit.
He looked up the Birmingham Church, and we realized it wasn't far from where we lived.
And he went one Sunday morning while I slept in, and he liked what he found there.
And he went back the next week.
And I slept in.
And this went on for four to six weeks or something.
And then he woke me up on Sunday morning and said, you are going with me.
And I said, okay.
And I went and I liked what I found there.
About three months after we joined, Steve at some point stood up in front of the congregation and looked at them and said, I am dying.
What are you going to do about it?
And the church rose, and I would not have made it through that next year and a half without the support that I got from those individuals, many of whom remain dear friends to this day, 23 years later since he's died.
We became very embedded in the life of that church.
I mean, I've served on the board and on pretty much every committee that you can.
For Andrew and Kay, the Birmingham UU Church offered a way to live a full life as their full selves in the buckle of the Bible belt, as blue dots in a red state.
And in 2015, Reverend Lone Broussard, with the enthusiastic support of the UU Church, was there in Linn Park to officiate state-sanctioned same-sex weddings that made these LGBTQ lives even fuller.
In part two of this story, We'll find out how the Birmingham UU Church came to be, how it has nurtured queer community in the Bible Belt for decades, and what it was like to be in Linn Park on that fateful day in 2015.
Thank you.
That's That's it for this first episode of Red State Religions.
Thank you so much for listening.
I'm Gillian Frank.
Make sure to subscribe, and go tell a friend or two the good news about progressive religious folks fighting the good fight in the most unlikely places.
We'll see you next week.
Red State Religions was created by me, Dr. Gillian Frank, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement, and AccessMonday Media.
Red State Religions was produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley Onishi and engineered by Scott Okamoto.
Carrie Onishi provided production assistance.
Red State Religions was made possible through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.
The term Bible Belt conjures images of all-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But what if I told you that the Bible Belt is more than holy rollers and holy judgment?
What if I told you that like any other belt, the Bible Belt is filled with holes that lead to unexpected places?
Where pastors and deacons and volunteer ministers demand equality and representation for gay couples, single moms, and anyone trying to get to the ballot box.
My name is Dr. Gillian Frank, and my new limited series podcast, Red State Religions, explores the persistence of liberal religious values and progressive politics in so-called red states by telling the stories of faith leaders, lay people, and congregations and how they put faith into action.
