When the church held a conference on homosexuality
A theologian stated in 1966: there was no reason to deny homosexual couples marriage.
On 22 August 1966, a three-day conference began in San Francisco of a kind that had hardly existed before. The Glide Urban Center and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual had invited people to the "Consultation on Theology and the Homosexual", which lasted until 24 August. The question under discussion was a delicate one at the time: what does the church actually have to say about homosexual people?
The Council had been founded two years earlier. At the end of May 1964, in Mill Valley, California, sixteen Protestant clergymen sat down at a table with thirteen representatives of the homophile movement. This gave rise to an organisation that was the first in the USA to include the word "homosexual" in its own name. It became known above all for the police operation against its New Year's ball at California Hall in 1965, which is regarded as a turning point in San Francisco's queer history.
For the conference in August 1966, the theologian Robert L. Treese wrote a paper on the biblical foundations. He went through the relevant passages, pointed out mistranslations and argued that the destruction of Sodom was no use as evidence against homosexuality. At the end he stated that he saw no reason, either logical or theological, to deny homosexual couples marriage, with the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples.
This was written in 1966, three years before the riots on New York's Christopher Street. The text was published in the simplest possible way: available from the Glide Urban Center on Ellis Street, fifty cents a copy. Its immediate impact, however, remained limited.