Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth Interview with Ruth Schmidt, Pastor and Trailblazing LGBTQ+ Clergy
About Harvey's guest:
Today’s show deals with the issue of religious institutions discriminating against the LGBTQ+ community. Our guest, Pastor Ruth Schmidt, was a senior director at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, until she was fired for refusing to sign the school’s mandatory statement of faith, which prohibits affirmation of same-sex marriage.
When she first entered Fuller as a student in 2016, she did sign the statement of faith. And she signed it again in 2022, this time as an employee, pursuant to Fuller’s policy of requiring senior staff members to sign the statement annually. I should point out that there are court rulings throughout the United States, permitting discrimination by religious institutions against gay students and employees, and this was most recently seen in October 2020, when the court affirmed the Fuller Seminary’s right to expel 2 students for being in same-sex marriages.
Getting back to our guest, when she was required in 2023 to re-sign the statement, she realized that it would be wrong for her to do that, given her imminent ordination into the United Church of Christ, which DOES accept marriage for same-sex couples. And she ALSO came to the realization that it was ethically wrong and hypocritical for the Fuller Theological Seminary, which prides itself in being multi-denominational, to make money from denominations that affirm same-sex marriage, but at the same time, compel its students and employees to sign a homophobic statement of faith, and to dismiss those who refuse to do so.
As a result of our guest being fired, and the groundswell of support she received, not only from students and faculty at Fuller, but from the community at large and the media, the Board of Trustees at the Fuller Theological Seminary created a task force to reconsider its policies relating to human sexuality, and the school has now proposed new sexuality standards for the students, but NOT for staff and faculty.
So there is still much work to be done.
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To learn more about Ruth Schmidt, go to:
https://www.instagram.com/rutheschmidt/
https://twitter.com/ruthschmidt
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