By Elana Seifert
According to Carroll, when he and Elenz asked to rent a cottage for this summer they were turned down by the board. “Suddenly it was personal,” says Nannette Graham. She sent letters to the board; to Bishop Joseph Sprague, who oversees the Methodist church’s Northern Illinois Conference; and other NIC officials. She and her husband also told the board that they were giving Carroll and Elenz keys to their cottage and would put up a pink neon sign in the window that read “Reconciling Cottage–Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgenders Welcome.” The board responded with a letter citing the association’s bylaws and rules and regulations for cottage owners–individuals own the cottages, but the association owns the land, so the cottagers are subject to its regulations. Those regulations state that cottages are for the owners’ personal use only and that guests must be approved by the board. If the Grahams didn’t want to abide by the rules, the letter went on, the board would be forced to sell their cottage.
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“People will always find a legal means, a technicality to discriminate,” says Birkhahn-Rommelfanger. “That’s historically what’s happened, whether the issue is racial or gender or other discrimination. Saying there wasn’t compliance with bylaws, for instance, is a pretense.” She goes on, “There’s no dispute in this case. One can believe homosexuals are persons of sacred worth and also believe their lifestyle is incompatible with church teachings. The Social Principles say both. There is a dispute there. But there is no dispute that all persons are entitled to human and civil rights.”
In response Raphael says that a religious organization’s right to discriminate may depend on whether the individuals involved perform functions that are essential to the church as a religious institution. “A Catholic church may be able to ban gay priests,” she says, “but may not be able to dismiss a gay janitor.”
