I'm feeling good about the United Methodist Church this morning. Yesterday the Wisconsin Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church voted for the second year in a row to oppose a proposed state constitutional ban on civil unions and marriage. In Wisconsin our Republican legislature is anxious to turn out the vote this November, and so they are taking a page out of Karl Rove's playbook and have placed on a ballot a constitutional amendment that bans civil unions and same-gender marriages. You can see the language of this ban on the website of Fair Wisconsin our main effort in this state to stop the ban.
I was part of writing of the resolution the Wisconsin United Methodist Annual Conference had passed last year opposing the constitutional ban when it was still being debated in the Wisconsin legislature. This year the right-wing in our Annual Conference organized to try to reverse that decision, but yesterday they failed. The Annual Conference (which consists of about 1000 voting members) voted to continue United Methodist opposition to the ban with a vote by a show of hands estimated by some observers to represent about two-thirds of the voting members.
The Conference is meeting in a suburb of Madison just a little to the west of where Jim and I live and we have been going out in the evenings after work to join with other Methodist supporters of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality. We saw many Conference members wearing rainbow stoles in solidarity with LGBT persons. Next year Wisconsin United Methodists will be turning their attention to our next United Methodist General Conference
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