By Bob Allen
After four years as executive director of Soulforce, a national nonprofit protest group opposed to discrimination against gays in religious groups, Cindi Love is stepping down.
Love, former national leader of the of Metropolitan Community Church, will become executive director of ACPA-College Student Educators International, a Washington-based association that supports student growth and development in higher education. Haven Herrin, deputy director of Soulforce, will serve as acting director effective Feb. 1.
Soulforce was founded in 1998 by Mel White, who worked as a ghostwriter for evangelical authors including Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham and Pat Robertson before revealing that he was gay. White set out to apply principles of nonviolent resistance as taught by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to oppose anti-gay rhetoric from the Religious Right.
The group became a fixture at Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings in the early 2000s, holding picket signs on the edge of convention plazas usually shared by anti-gay protesters from Westboro Baptist Church.
Thirty-four members were arrested at the 2001 SBC annual meeting in New Orleans, when supporters conducting a mock jazz funeral were charged with trespassing for trying to take their message inside the meeting hall.
In 2002, a dozen Soulforce protestors infiltrated America’s Center in St. Louis demanding to speak after convention officials refused a meeting. They were arrested, along with 38 others detained while trying to enter the building.
In 2011, Soulforce joined five other pro-gay groups to collect 10,000 signatures on a petition asking the Southern Baptist Convention to issue an apology to gays similar to one they drafted to African-Americans in 1995.
Protesters were invited inside the convention hall in Phoenix to meet with SBC President Bryant Wright, who told the delegation he was “certainly glad to hear of your concerns,” but in the end they must agree to disagree.
“We don’t feel there can be a need to apologize for teaching sexual purity,” said Wright, pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in suburban Atlanta. “Our only authority for expressing our faith is the word of God, and all through the word is sexual purity for God’s people, and that is true whether it’s homosexual sex or it’s heterosexual sex. We just feel like from our understanding of Scripture, that that is taught in the Old and the New Testaments.”
Since 2006, Soulforce has supported a project called the Equality Ride, an outreach bus tour in which young adults travel to Christian colleges with policies that discriminate against gay students.
In 2007, Equality Riders paid a visit to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in response to comments by the seminary’s president that if it were medically possible, steps should be taken to prevent homosexuality.
“If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin,” seminary President Albert Mohler wrote in a March 2, 2007, blog titled “Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?”
Twelve young adults were arrested at a sit-in outside Mohler’s office on March 26, 2007. According to a Soulforce account, 22 Equality Riders sat in Norton Hall about 75 minutes waiting for a response from Mohler, when an administrator said Mohler was unwilling to meet with them.
Police were called and part of the delegation moved to the edge of campus. Twelve, who refused to budge until Mohler apologized, were eventually taken into custody and charged with criminal trespassing.
Love grew up in the Church of Christ and married a minister from the church, but transferred to a Southern Baptist church after her divorce in 1981. She has two children from her first marriage and married her longtime partner, Sue Jennings, in Canada after the country passed legislation permitting same-sex marriage in 2005.
Herrin, a Dallas native who describes her spirituality as a mix of Christianity and Buddhism, has an art degree from the University of Richmond.
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