Red State Religions: The Religious Fight for Same Sex Marriage in Alabama Part II
Dr. Gillian Frank continues to explore 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 Borad's, 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.
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
For more research-based podcasts and public scholarship visit www.axismundi.us.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundi Axis Mundi On a bright winter morning in 2015,
Outside the same courthouse where Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned for his civil rights activism in 1967, ministers from Birmingham's Unitarian Universalist Church conducted wedding ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples
who had just won the legal rights.
My full name is Luna Jensen Broussard, and I'm a retired Unitarian Universalist minister.
I was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Bringing that up because otherwise people may sit there and wonder, where on earth is she from?
Though she was born in Denmark, Reverend Broussard had lived in Alabama long enough to temper her expectations when it came to state-sanctioned same-sex marriage.
I thought the most we could hope for was a service of union kind of thing.
A legal thing, you know?
At least.
But I never thought this would happen.
But in 2015, it did happen.
And for the congregation at the Birmingham Unitarian Universalist Church, it was a big deal.
Their LGBTQ members now had access to a vital right, a right that would protect and honor their relationships.
It was just the latest civil rights struggle the church had engaged in there in the buckle of the Bible Belt as religious blue dots in a red state.
Welcome to Red State Redskins.
A limited series podcast exploring liberal religion in conservative spaces.
My name is Gillian Frank.
In this series, we're exploring the many perforations in the so-called Bible Belt.
The term Bible Belt conjures images of old-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But just like any other belt, this label fails to contain the excesses it surrounds.
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.
opportunities. Music.
you you
The Birmingham Unitarian Universalist Church, which became home for Kay and Andrew, who we met in our previous episode, is newer than many other congregations in that city.
But this church is still steeped in history.
The original congregation grew out of efforts in the early 1950s to gather religious liberals interested in forming a fellowship in Birmingham.
At that time, and even to this day, Many residents of Birmingham knew little about Unitarianism.
Much of the church's early outreach was explaining to people who they were and what they believed.
In that spirit, in 1955, the new minister for Birmingham's Unitarian Church wrote an article in the Birmingham News that explained their key tenets.
The article explained, Unitarians believe human nature has changed, is changing, and will continue to change For the better, if we will that this shall be so.
It continued, Unitarians assert the absolute worth of all persons, of all classes, races, nations, and creeds.
Unitarians, the article explained, believe in democracy as not only a way of life, but as the way of life in all relationships, in the family, in social, political, and business relationships, in church.
By 1958, Birmingham's Unitarians had gone from borrowing space at the YMCA to having a bricks and mortar church of their own.
When they dedicated the building, the president of the American Unitarian Association reminded those present that faith must lead to action.
He explained, We do not inherit our religion.
It is not a bequest, but a quest.
He prodded Unitarians to spread tolerance and goodwill.
An ideal world.
Though they professed racial equality and social justice, Birmingham's Unitarians didn't always match words with deeds.
In 1961, the Unitarian Church of Birmingham denied an interracial civil rights group permission to hold meetings at their church.
The congregation feared that doing so would hurt what they called orderly church activities, and that it would harm their finances as they sought to pay for their new church.
In other words, they worried about making waves in polite white society.
However, the congregation's priorities shifted after the KKK's bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in the summer of 1910.
This act of anti-Black terrorism killed four children.
By 1964, UUs were participating in voter registration drives.
After the events of Bloody Sunday in 1965, when Alabama Highway Patrol troopers brutalized civil rights demonstrators outside of Selma, UUs locally and nationally mobilized.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for people of conscience to come to Selma, Alabama And joined a civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the courthouse in Montgomery.
Religious leaders and the faithful from a variety of denominations descended upon the state, and members of the UU Church of Birmingham coordinated the travels of hundreds of Unitarian Universalists, picking them up from the airport and opening up their homes.
Participants remember.
That the church received numerous threatening phone calls for these activities.
Among the UUs who answered Dr. King's call was the Reverend James Reeb of Boston.
Before he could even join the march, white segregationists ambushed Reeb in Selma, fracturing his skull.
Reverend Reeb died from his injuries at a Birmingham hospital a few days later.
His murder created national outrage, sparking marches, And rallies across the country and further fueling UU commitments to civil rights activism in Alabama.
So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans.
Many were brutally assaulted.
One good man, a man of God, was killed.
The cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government.
members outside of the UU church, many of whom came from evangelical traditions,
Unitarians barely qualified as Christians, and their civil rights activities made them even more suspicious.
One Birmingham resident described the Unitarian Universalists as, in his words, a race-mixing social club for unbelievers whose biggest need is to hear and heed the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ by spirit-filled men and women of God who won't likely be found in the Unitarian Church.
But this civil rights activism, this moment of translating faith into action, became central to the story the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham told and still tells about itself.
Indeed, over the next half century, this congregation continued to pursue social justice causes, including reproductive rights, voting rights, labor rights, environmental justice, and...
Gay rights.
In 2015, 50 years after the Selma to Montgomery march, the fight over gay marriage came to Alabama.
For Unitarian Universalists, the spirit of 1965 impelled them to participate in the struggle for gay marriage.
Even before the battle over gay marriage came to Alabama, the UU Church was already a bastion for Birmingham's queer community.
Not only did it welcome members like Kay and Andrew, it provided a space for LGBTQ youth by holding gay proms.
It was well known we had to be careful in the invitations because, you know, high school and all that.
And so high school people came and they were dressed for the prom.
And some came with women and women and men and men and some just came by themselves.
And we did have a police car in the parking lot for safety.
We had, I mean, we did get some threats, of course.
But hey, that church was used to that.
I'm laughing.
It's kind of funny.
But they were.
So, okay, a thread.
Big deal.
It's going to make us want to do it more.
Yeah. Why was it even necessary to have a gay prom in the basement of the UU church?
Oh, my God.
You could not, in most high schools, go to a prom with your boyfriend, if you are a boy, or girlfriend, if you are.
A girl?
That would be not possible.
It was a way to provide that for them, a sense of normalcy and also acceptance.
This commitment to celebrating queer people and their relationships meant that when the tide turned on gay marriage, Birmingham's Unitarian Universalists were eager to bless these unions as well.
By 2015, steady activism and a string of court decisions and referenda had led 36 states to legalize gay marriage.
Of the 14 states in which same-sex couples could not wed, most were in the South and Southwest.
In the heart of the Bible Belt, it was still against the law.
In 2014, a year before gay marriage came to Alabama, Andrew, from our previous episode, and his partner Tommy got married out of state.
Let me catch you up.
After Andrew's partner Steve died, Andrew continued to participate in religious life at the UU Church of Birmingham.
It was at church where he met Tommy, and their courtship and relationship took place before the eyes of, and with the enthusiastic approval of, the congregation.
Tommy and I had talked about it.
We'd been together for, you know, seriously for 11 years at this point, and we talked about, you know, should we get married?
So we decided...
We better get married.
Just for protection and financial reasons.
We did not want to make a big show of it.
We'd been together for a long time.
We knew we could not get married in Alabama.
My family's still in Seattle.
On one of our trips up to Seattle, we went down to the King County Courthouse where a lawyer friend of mine from high school had hooked us up with one of the criminal court judges.
And we got married in the criminal courtroom right after the Grand Theft Auto case.
It was the two of us and my father and one of my cousins as witnesses.
And then we had a family dinner in my sister's backyard.
The church was a little put out that we didn't have a marriage.
So when we got back, we were told, you're getting a reception whether you want it or not.
So we did have a second reception the church put on when we came back later that summer.
I think they felt ownership of us, you know, as a couple, having basically watched the courtship and the getting together and the developing of the household and the very much embedding, you know,
Like other states, gay marriage came to Alabama through grassroots legal efforts.
A lesbian couple residing in Alabama who had married in California filed a lawsuit challenging the state's ban on gay marriage.
Their case came before a sympathetic judge in January of 2015, and this judge ruled in the couple's favor.
His ruling declared that Alabama's statutory and constitutional gay marriage bans were unconstitutional.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay the decision, and Alabama became the 37th state And the first in the Bible Belt where gays and lesbians were allowed to wed.
I thought the most we could hope for was a service of union kind of thing.
A legal thing, you know, at least.
But 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, it was...
There were people at the courthouse, of course, and there were demonstrations against, and there was a lot of people wanting to get married, and a lot of people who had been, I'm sorry, ordained in the Universal Church of Life,
which is basically going online and paying a little bit.
I mean, it's nothing, frankly, and that annoyed me some.
Because some of them were actually charging for the marriages, which I did not in that particular day and place.
But my intern minister, who was married, well, she had gone to another state to be married legally with her partner.
And she and I went down there in full regalia.
And she got a place inside the courthouse.
And I My church made cupcakes for people.
How do you like that?
Isn't that cool?
I thought that was so great.
They also had borrowed bouquets.
If you want to, okay, you could take it at least for the ceremony, you know?
And I did a very simple ceremony because I realized there were people of every possible denominations there and some with no denomination.
There was actually one Methodist minister who came with his daughter and her partner and he would so have liked to do the wedding.
But he couldn't because he would have been kicked out of his church.
So I did the wedding, but of course I gave him a large part in it, you know, whatever he wanted to say.
I just did the actual do you and so forth.
There was one couple from my church that showed up with their adopted daughter and they wanted me to marry them, which was really meaningful.
My name is Linda K. M. Finger.
My preferred name is K. And I got married in 2015 at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama.
We honestly never thought we would be able to get married in Alabama.
We had lots of friends who went to other states and got married.
But for us...
It was really important to get married in Alabama and for it to be legal for us to get married in Alabama because our philosophy has always been be the change you wish to see in the world.
And for us, staying in Alabama and making change in Alabama in a small way by being the best next-door neighbor that we could be, by being the best Family and parents that we could be.
By just being part of the society and helping other people see that we are productive just like everyone else.
That we are that next-door neighbor.
That we are that good friend.
That we are that nice family.
That was important to us.
So many people left the South.
And I said,
absolutely. So we went into our daughter's bedroom and she was a senior in high school.
We went in and said, hey, will you be our best woman tomorrow?
And she said yes.
And so we started scurrying around and picked out some clothes and called a couple of friends and said, hey, we're going to get married tomorrow at the courthouse.
And so we did.
There were tents set up with the Unitarian Church had set up a cupcake tent and we're handing out cupcakes.
So basically we went into the courthouse.
We got our marriage license and we came back out and our minister, Reverend Luna, was there and she married us and a couple of our friends were there.
And our friends, Jim and Kathleen, brought champagne and cake, and we laid that out and had Dom Perignon on the courthouse steps.
What did it mean to you to have your minister officiating that ceremony?
Oh, everything.
I mean, it was just, it was perfect.
And so validating.
All the people who I loved the most were there.
My daughter and my wife.
My daughter's godmother.
Our best couple friends.
And people from the UU Church were there handing out cupcakes.
And so there were people I knew.
And there were people I knew from the LGBT community.
So there were lots of people around that I knew.
It was...
a great event.
Music by Ben Thede
It probably won't surprise you to learn that anti-gay protesters hovered in the background of the celebrations at Lynn Park that day in 2015.
You won't be surprised to learn that Alabama's Chief Justice, Roy Moore, who had become infamous for refusing to remove a five-ton Ten Commandments statue from in front of the state Supreme Court prodded judges to not issue marriage licenses.
You won't be shocked to hear that the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions issued a resolution expressing what they called moral outrage, intense grief, and strong disagreement over court rulings that have set our culture in a direction against the biblical definition of marriage.
Their ideas, tedious and repetitive, are well known, and they are also growing in power with the backing of the current presidential administration.
The story of gay marriage in Alabama and across the United States is much more than a love story.
It is a story about civil rights and public vows.
Marriage as an institution dignifies and solemnizes some relationships Our present moment,
however, is one in which there is a concerted conservative religious effort To disappear LGBTQ people from public view and to strip them of social protections.
Executive orders have overturned policies preventing and combating discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.
Executive Order 13988.
And advancing equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.
Executive Order 14075.
Meanwhile, government websites mentioning LGBTQ people have been erased.
As one news report documents, pages on LGBTQ people, their health and history have vanished from federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Justice Department, the Commerce Department,
and the Labor Department.
The federal government has also deleted or modified More than a dozen National Park Service webpages featuring LGBTQ history.
These include The Pride Guide, an interactive resource for gay-straight alliances seeking to learn about LGBTQ history and to bridge divides, and Philadelphia's Heritage of LGBTQ Activism, a page that featured that city's long and powerful history of LGBTQ civil rights struggles.
Other websites featuring trans activists of color.
Like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Polly Murray have also vanished.
At a moment when there is a concerted effort to disappear sexual variance and to roll the clock back on gay rights, it is worth resting on the religious voices who sanctified same-sex marriage in Alabama in 2015 and to dignify their contribution to our shared history.
I don't want us to go backwards.
And there isn't much I can do except vote and speak up and that kind of thing.
That's all I can do.
I can no longer, I have limited mobility and I can't even demonstrate because I can't walk like that no more, which is sad.
I mean, so for me, it is also a loss.
I can no longer do all those things and I don't have the same.
Oh, the same health I used to have.
And what's frustrating about that is that I can't do all I want to do.
You understand?
I mean, you don't.
You're not old enough.
You're getting there, but you're not there yet.
Let me offer you this.
Let me offer you this.
This podcast, we're going to share your voice and your story.
And so what you did matters and will continue to resonate.
We're going to share your voice.
In that spirit, I wonder if there is a prayer that you can share with me and whoever listens to this that speaks to that moment in your life where you were standing in front of City Hall and offering comfort and support to these beautiful people trying to get married.
Well, let me see.
Spirit of life and of love, I thank you for this day where we see justice being done and equality being celebrated.
I thank you for lessening the suffering of people who had to hide their relationships for far too long.
Who had to hide who they are.
Who couldn't be out in the open.
And who were made to feel less because they were who they were.
God of life and love, I remember.
I remember a young man who killed himself.
I'm sure there are others.
There are many others.
Because society had done this to him.
I remember a young man whose parents sent him to the Christian, whatever the hell, it shouldn't be called Christian, and he had to go through that because he was gay.
For any of us to have, to deny who we are, Amen.
Amen. That's
it for our second episode of Red State Religions.
Thank you so much for listening.
My name's Gillian Frank.
Make sure to subscribe, and please go tell a friend or two the good news about progressive religious folks fighting the good fight in the most unlikely places.
In our next episode, we'll tell you the story of religious struggles for reproductive freedom.
I hope you'll join us.
Red State Religions was created by me, Dr. Gillian Frank, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media and Civic Engagement, and Access Monday Media.
Red State Religions was produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley Onishi and engineered by Scott Okamoto.
Kerry 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 old-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But what if I told you that the Bible Belt is more than holy rollers and holy judgment?
