In support of City View Friends Church

As a community of Friends (Quakers) in Black Mountain, we are moved by the courage of City View Friends Church and their desire to welcome all to their worship, regardless of sexual orientation. We believe they have been faithful in their witness, and are saddened that they have paid such a high price for it. Quakers have long been known for opposition to discrimination. As a community, we have searched deeply, and we have found that there is powerful living force of God’s love that unites us across all differences. It is this Love that grounds our historical witness against racial and gender discrimination. It grounds our witness against war. It now grounds our witness against the discrimination that causes so much pain in our gay and lesbian communities. We recognize that other Friends may differ with us. We also acknowledge that we too struggle to be faithful. Nevertheless, we offer our testimony that God’s love holds us all as one, that we are all invited to the table, and that we come home most fully to God’s love when we also come home to each other, in humility and respect.

-approved at a Called Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business on 3/16/08
-letter to the Asheville Citizen-Times, published on 3/28/08 in the Opinion section

Quakers Witness to Marriage Equality

As members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) we have a long-standing commitment to the equality of all individual human beings, as expressed not only in the teachings of Jesus and in our own Quaker faith tradition, but also in the Declaration of Independence, which declared equality the basis for creating the independent nation which became the United States. We consider our support of same-sex marriage to be of a piece with our tradition of Quaker witness to equality. This tradition includes honoring equality between men and women (by working for women’s education, right to vote, and equal property rights), and between races (by working to end slavery, to support civil rights, and to legalize interracial marriage).

Because of this witness and out of our prayerful discernment the Swannonoa Valley Friends Meeting declares publicly that we will no longer serve as an agent of the State in certifying the legality of marriages carried out under our care, so long as the State of North Carolina declines to recognize the legality of non-heterosexual marriages. Although couples seeking legal certification of their marriage will need to do so in a civil procedure, the meeting will continue to celebrate marriages of couples under our care, regardless of sexual orientation.

This conscientious stand is not against the right of the State to give legal sanction to marriage. Rather we are witnessing against the injustice of the system as currently practiced. We honor the distinction between marriage as a religious sacrament, defined by a particular faith community, and marriage as an instrument of the state, protected by law because of the benefits it offers to civil society, a distinction that is part of the constitutional separation of Church and State.

In taking this position at this time, Friends stand with a growing number of faith communities. We especially recognize the efforts towards marriage equality of the local group “People of Faith for Just Relationships,” especially the public witness of two Asheville ministers, Joe Hoffman of the First Congregational Church and Mark Ward of the Unitarian-Universalist Church.

We welcome prayerful dialogue on this issue

-Approved at Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business 01st day 04th month 2007