Area Priest and MN Religious Leaders Oppose Amendment to Define Marriage

Long ago the StarTribune decided to remove the Boy Scouts from its list of candidates for the receipt of the paper's annual distribution of alms because they wouldn't allow homosexual Scout leaders. At that point I decided that I had had enough and cancelled my subscription that I probably had been getting for 25 or 30 years. On rare occasions, I do run (generally drive) out and pick up a copy for some specific issue.

Today was such a day and I did walk a few blocks down to the local "Sosa" (I wonder what that means) to pick one up because the Desparate Irish Housewife had alerted blog readers everywhere to the fact that Father Michael Tegeder, pastor of St. Edward's parish in upscale and tony west Bloomington, was up to his usual tricks and had signed on to a quarter page ad in the paper of record objecting to the proposed constitutional amendment in the State Legislature defining marriage as being a legal state having been contracted to and generally blessed as the union of one man and one woman.

The ad described the signers, The Faith Family Fairness Alliance (I wonder why it wasn't a "federation", a "fund", a "fusion", a "federacy", a "fraternity", I guess I know why they didn't choose that word, or a "fellowship") (I treasure the thesaurus that I got for joining the Book of the Month Club about 1962) of 261 (Desparate's count) "pastors, rabbis, seminary professors and other religious leaders in Minnesota."

Only Father Tegeder, two men and a woman were listed as being Catholics. The preponderance of the con-FUSION seemed to be Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ and United Methodist adherents. The balance were a scattering of other, smaller protestant sects, a Soto Zen Buddhist (apparently they split up into many diverse groups too, or maybe that should have been "Solo"), and two members of the Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the homosexual religious goup. Desparate is new to town, but I've been here a long time and other than Father Tegeder's name, the only other one that I recognized was that of a female Reform Rabbi.

Desparate did a great parsing of the "call to arms" of the group (if you're looking for a job and can write, you might contact them about future work. They don't seem to write well. I guess we know that preaching is the only reason to attending most protestant services so they probably don't study composition in their seminaries).

Desparate is a member in good standing of the Brigade of St. Blog's Humorists and their Commander in Chief, The Curt Jester, also has some comments today on the Star Tribune ad.