Press Conference Speakers & Photos
May 22, 2006
Clergy For Fairness hosted a press conference to announce a national petition drive for religious leaders who are against the Federal Marriage Amendment. A list of speakers and photos from the event are presented below. For more information, see the full press release.
The Rev. Dr. Paul Simmons
“Let there be no mistake about it: there is a broad and profound opposition to the proposed [Federal Marriage] Amendment among religious people. The thunder of the religious right should be resisted as misguided and prejudicial: an effort to deprive a certain group of people in the United States, who are citizens, of rights guaranteed for the rest of us, and under the Constitution we take them for granted.”
Rabbi Craig Axler
“As Jews, across the board, when we see this Federal Marriage Amendment, what I believe it brings up in our mind, is what it is to live as a Jew with a sense of collective history, with a sense of history that says that anytime one individual group, one class of persons, is singled out for distinct treatment, for discrimination, it is not long until another group is going to be singled out for similar discrimination.”
The Rev. Dr. Katie Day
“I can tell you that what is happening in both the Lutheran and the Presbyterian community is that both communions are engaged in a struggle, in a dialogue, in a lively debate about homosexuality and about the nature of marriage. This is a debate that in some ways threatens the very future of these two historic denominations, and both are proceeding, hopefully, prayerfully and with integrity. If the Federal Marriage [Amendment] was to pass, this would completely undermine and chill this debate. It would make this debate moot. It would take the debate of two religious bodies who are struggling with a faith issue, a moral issue, a theological issue — it would take it out of our hearts, our voices, our lives, our jurisdiction.”
Dr. Kenneth L. Samuel
“If we want to protect marriage the answer is not in discriminating against a class of people. The answer is in putting our energy, our resources, and our effort at ensuring a decent public education for all citizens, decent health care for all citizens, and economic opportunities for all citizens. To discriminate against a class of people is wrong because a threat to justice anywhere is still a threat to justice everywhere.”
The Rev. Dr. Riess Potterveld
“Families are of all types and kinds and descriptions. Certainly many of those families will be headed by same-sex couples, and to pass this [Federal Marriage Amendment] would be to delegitimize their relationship, to cut away at their rights, to offend the sense of justice that has been characteristic and important to the life of this nation.”
Bishop Joe Doss
“The people that we’re talking about are human beings with all the human dignity that God has endowed them with — children of God — and we are to see them that way and treat them that way. And so finally, the thing that I’ve heard most profoundly here today, and I certainly want to address, is the issue of justice, and let me tell you, the church itself, when it sorts out all of the various issues that comes before it in history, always lands on the side of justice, because that’s where God is.”