ELLENSBURG – A small group of anti-gay picketers from Kansas on Sunday targeted a church that until recently was the home parish of a lesbian minister.
Karen Dammann no longer preaches at Ellensburg First United Methodist Church, having taken family leave following a decision by the church’s national conference that homosexuality is incompatible with its teachings. The seven picketers said they were targeting the church because of the support its members had shown for Dammann.
Many of Dammann’s supporters attended services Sunday, greeting the protesters with rainbow-colored ribbons, messages of tolerance and yellow tape delineating a “hate-free zone.”
Linda Lambert, a Methodist from Bellingham, made the trip to Central Washington to show support.
“I feel a lot of kinship and support of the Ellensburg Methodists,” Lambert told the Daily Record of Ellensburg. “I wanted to be here for them.”
The protesters, bearing signs with messages such as “Thank God for AIDS,” came from the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church, which is led by Fred Phelps, a virulent critic of homosexuality. Though Phelps did not attend Sunday’s protest, his 21-year-old granddaughter and 12-year-old grandson did.
“I like telling everyone what they’re doing is wrong and that God hates America, and it’s just fun coming out and standing,” said the grandson, Micaiah Phelps-Davis.
The Westboro Baptist Church “may be America’s most vitriolic fountain of anti-homosexual hate,” according to a file kept on the group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In addition to its views on gays, the group cheered the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia and maintained that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were God’s way of punishing a nation gone astray.
The picketers said they took issue with the result of a Methodist church trial in Bothell this spring. During it, a jury of 13 Northwest Methodist reaffirmed Dammann’s right to preach.
Despite that ruling, the national Methodist conference later found that gays could not be ordained, and Dammann decided not to return to her church. She remains on family leave in Oregon.
Several Central Washington University students were among those counterprotesting, in what remained a civil display.
Anna Chance, a 20-year-old CWU student who is not a Methodist, said she was particularly upset that the picketers included Phelps’ grandson.
“I saw the little boy get out of their car, and I just feel sad for them that they have all this hate,” Chance said.
Dodie Haight, a member of the Ellensburg church and ardent supporter of Dammann, said she wasn’t letting the picketers bother her. “I try not to think about them,” she said.
Inside the church, the atmosphere was much lighter. Dammann herself did not attend, but Lindsay Thompson, the Seattle attorney who advised Dammann at her church trial, was in town at the church’s request to offer a guest sermon.
Thompson took a moment to condemn Phelps’ group but spent most of his homily focused on the challenges that lie ahead as the United Methodist Church continues to be divided by issues of homosexuality.
“We have all been swept up in the cresting wave of history, then left, when it has passed, to determine what it meant,” he said.
He urged the 100 or so people in attendance – a considerably larger crowd than the church typically draws – to continue to push for inclusiveness in the denomination.
“You are the movers of history,” Thompson said.
While in Ellensburg, the Westboro Baptist Church picketers also stopped by St. Andrew’s Catholic Church because they are anti-Catholic, and the Calvary Baptist and First Presbyterian churches because those churches do not condemn gay people so much as homosexuality.
Ellensburg Police Department Sgt. Mike Coppin said all of the protests ended without incident.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
