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President Barack ObamaThe White House1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
March 27, 2009
Dear Mr. President:
On behalf of the friends and members of the denomination of Metropolitan Community Churches, I am writing to thank you for endorsing the Joint Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity first presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations last December.
Your endorsement reverses the previous United States’ position and serves to align the U.S. more fully with the causes of human rights and justice.
Thank you for honoring your word to be a President for all people within the United States and a world voice seeking to bring nations and peoples together.
With your signature to the United Nations Joint Statement, you affirm, in the words of State Department spokesperson Robert Wood, that “the United States is an outspoken defender of human rights,” and that our nation will no longer be silent or complicit while people are arbitrarily arrested, deprived of economic opportunity and social access, tortured, imprisoned and executed.
You affirm that we are global citizens and we must hold each other to the highest moral standards of equal dignity and respect for all life across all borders.
As you know, 70 member countries of the United Nations continue to criminalize the lives of LGBT people. Several still impose the death penalty. There remain states in our own nation where discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in employment and housing is tolerated. Our U.S. armed services continue to hold LGBT service members to the double standard of honest and honorable service, while enforcing silence and shame about our true and God-given identities.
God has not given us a spirit of temerity, as the Epistle of II Timothy records, but of power and love. I trust that that spirit will continue to guide you as you push forward with your vision of equality for all. I know, as you do, that that quest will not be without cost.
Every day in each of the 28 nations around the globe where Metropolitan Community Churches offer a message of hope to LGBT people and the opportunity to congregate in safe space, our people confront the cost of our central conviction that God’s love is for all people.
- As noted in the report of the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, more than 30 MCC churches have been the targets of arson and firebombing, a rate higher than for any other religious denomination in the United States. Several of our churches have been vandalized with hate slogans and painted with swastikas, crosses were burned on one pastor’s lawn, and a member of our clergy was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime.
- In Nigeria, an MCC Pastor along with his congregation had to flee their place of worship, leaving the altar set for communion, because of an approaching mob. One lesbian congregant was overcome and severely beaten.
- Our congregation in Jamaica was attacked during the funeral of our choir director by a machete-wielding, anti-LGBT mob.
Laws that criminalize people for who they are are inconsistent with current standards of international law and must be changed. More fundamentally, however, we must all come to terms with our shared and common humanity.
Your signature on the United Nations Joint Statement not only sends a clear message that LGBT rights are human rights, but more basically, that we are human beings, members of the one family of God.
On behalf of all those who have found a spiritual home in Metropolitan Community Churches and the courage to be true to their God given natures, I thank you for your witness.
I pledge our prayerful support for you and your administration, as you continue to work for justice and equality for all.
Grace and Peace,
The Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson
Moderator
Metropolitan Community Churches
