Church leaders preaching ban on gay marriage.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

As a Christian leader, Mike Jaskilka said he had little hesitation about urging his congregation to sign petitions last month to put a same-sex marriage ban on the ballot.

"I made it the main issue of the day," said Jaskilka, the pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Eugene. "I said one of my goals today is to persuade you to sign it."

After his sermon, Jaskilka encouraged that day's 200 or so worshippers to queue up at tables where petitions awaited their signature.

Churches are playing a pivotal role in asking voters to consider a constitutional ban on gay marriage. Because the signature drive began only six weeks before the July 2 deadline to qualify for the Nov. 2 ballot, it's critical for proponents to reach out to groups with hundreds of members who already support the cause.

The proposal's chief campaigner, Tim Nashif, said his Defense of Marriage Coalition has enlisted pastors across the state in the bid to gather at least 100,840 signatures.

"There are a lot of churches, and if they get involved with what we're doing, we'll get a fair number of signatures," said Nashif, although he stressed that the campaign isn't relying solely on evangelical religious leaders to get signatures.

Nick Nott, the pastor at Eugene's Westside Christian Church, said local church leaders are taking a variety of approaches to the measure.

"I think some are ignoring it and others are just super-passionate about it and are pushing to get every member to sign it," he said.

Nott said he was comfortable allowing a member to make the petitions available at a table in the lobby, "so people can sign it or they can ignore it."

Nott considers homosexual acts to be sinful and marriage to be a sacred union between one man and one woman. And he said 90 percent of his church's 130 members probably support the ballot measure signature drive. Still, he has been reluctant to preach on such culturally divisive issues.

But the gay-marriage debate - ignited by President Bush's State of the Union vow to push for a federal constitutional ban and legal and legislative jostling from Massachusetts to Multnomah County - has forced society and religious leaders to confront the issue.

Nott attended a conference on gay marriage this spring in Clackamas for evangelical church leaders.

"Their message," he said, "was, `Say something to your church, because they're all wondering, what do you believe?' '

Nott said he worked the issue into a recent sermon on the larger theme of family matters.

"But I said the bottom line is that God would have us love everybody," he said. "I said my fear is we talk about these hot-button issues and we create this dislike or hatred, even, for people who aren't like us."

Jaskilka, the Berean Baptist Church pastor, said he, too, shared a concern that speaking out against gay marriage and encouraging congregation members to sign petitions banning such unions would fuel criticism that he was promoting hate.

"This has nothing to do with hatred, nothing to do with trying to discriminate against certain classes," he said, explaining that all societies have historically recognized marriage as a heterosexual union. In addition, he said the Bible's teaching that marriage "is part of the creator's design from the beginning" compelled him to take a stand.

Oregon's culture wars over homosexuality flared up in the early 1990s, when the Oregon Citizens Alliance unsuccessfully pushed a series of anti-gay rights ballot measures. While some conservative Christian churches supported the efforts, mainline and liberal churches and synagogues did not.

The leaders of those houses of worship in the Eugene area formed the Religious Response Network, which held vigils and interfaith prayer services, advertised lists of congregation members who opposed the OCA's measures and distributed campaign literature.

Marion Malcolm, one of the network's founders, said the group has gone intermittently "dormant" as the culture wars have waned, but recently began meeting as the signature drive mounted to put the gay-marriage ban on the ballot.

Malcolm said members are keeping one another apprised of developments on the signature-gathering front at local churches, but was not actively participating with the "decline-to-sign" campaign that is encouraging people to withhold their signatures from petitions.

"The people who are going to work to put that measure on the ballot are not people that we can easily reach," she said. "If they're going to get enough signatures, they're going to get them primarily out of the conservative religious community. And if those people read scripture the way that I think they do, there's not much profit in arguing about it with them."

Malcolm said the Religious Response Network would revive many of its activities from the 1990s should the measure qualify for the ballot, bringing the debate to every voter in Oregon.

One of the network's leaders, Dan Bryant, the pastor at First Christian Church in Eugene, said he was prepared to take part in such efforts to let people know that not all Christians are campaigning for this.

He said that while he has not barred members from bringing anti-gay-marriage petitions to church, none have circulated them, to his knowledge.

"There are people of faith who do not condemn homosexuality as terrible, but who accept it as the way God made some people," said Bryant, who has shared his views with his 300 church members through past sermons and a recent column in the church newsletter.

"Our command is to love and accept them the same as anyone else, not to discriminate against them."

INITIATIVE PETITIONS

The initiative campaign to submit to voters a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage must meet a signature quota within a limited time period

Signatures: 100,840 valid signatures are required to put a constitutional amendment on the Nov. 2 ballot

Deadline: Signature sheets must be submitted to the state Elections Division by July 2

CAPTION(S):

Pastor Mike Jaskilka is encouraging his congregation to support a gay marriage ban.