Gay marriage hurts families? There's no evidence

RALEIGH, N.C. — On that afternoon five years ago, Randy and Jill Keel arranged to meet on familiar and neutral ground. The setting was the coffee bar in a cavernous bookstore here, a place they had used other times in the two years since they had separated. Oddly anonymous in such a public place, they could speak bluntly, and angrily if necessary, outside the earshot of their four children.

Mr. Keel had spent the previous months practicing this day’s words with a therapist. He had known the essence of what he had to say for far longer. “I’m gay,” he told his wife. Ms. Keel, for her part, felt less shock than relief, for something inexplicable about their breakup had just been explained.

After the tears and the hugs came the task of informing their children, who ranged in age from 9 to 16. And beyond that difficult disclosure, another question loomed: what about church? What church anywhere nearby would possibly accept a gay man and his family?

Both Randy and Jill had grown up in Southern Baptist churches in small North Carolina towns, and even as their theology and politics turned liberal, they clung to the comforts of the faith’s rhythms and rituals, the thick mesh of community.

While raising their children, they had helped found a congregation in a Raleigh suburb. Mr. Keel taught Sunday school and served as a deacon, and with Ms. Keel took adult Bible-study classes.

They had felt a chill from their pastor and congregation just for being separated, and the stigma of divorce paled next to the prevailing Baptist attitude toward homosexuality. The Southern Baptist Convention officially condemned it as “a violation and perversion of divine standards.” The American Baptist Churches, generally more moderate, called homosexuality “incompatible” with biblical teaching.

“I was wondering where we could all end up together,” Ms. Keel, a 48-year-old psychologist, recalled in an interview this week. “I was wondering where my children could get support. When you have your history in church, it doesn’t make sense to throw it all out. There were parts I wanted to hang onto. But I also wanted my kids to be in an environment where they could say, ‘My dad is gay,’ and nobody would care.”

For Mr. Keel, the prospect seemed impossible. “I never thought church would be a part of our family life that we could continue,” Mr. Keel, a 50-year-old accountant, said in an interview.

Yet on Easter Sunday in 2006, the Keels’ three sons — Adam, Sam and Seth — were baptized, with their grandparents looking on, and with both Mr. and Ms. Keel attending with their respective boyfriends. (Their daughter, Molly, the eldest child, had been baptized years earlier in their previous church.)

What made this unlikely event not only possible but ordinary was the place where it was occurring, Pullen Memorial Baptist Church.

 

Gay marriage hurts families? There's no evidence
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