By Mark Tooley, UMAction Executive Director
Note: UMAction is a committee of Institute for Religion and Democracy, an independent agency working for renewal in mainline denominations.
April 1997 – The General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church is trying to raise over $4 million to renovate its headquarters building on Capitol Hill. The objective is to “enhance” the United Methodist Church’s “social justice” witness in the nation’s capital.
What kind of “witness” in Washington, D.C., is the board enhancing? The board’s Fall 1996, directors’ meeting gave some strong hints.
General Secretary Thom White Wolf Fassett has defended the Board of Church and Society’s defense of partial-birth abortions, its opposition to the death penalty, its hostility to welfare reform, its aid to a repressive communist regime and its support for homosexual rights.
“The Democratic Party comes closest to the positions of the United Methodist Church,” said Fassett. Ironically, he denounced the welfare reform bill that President Clinton signed with the approval of many congressional Democrats. That bill will require welfare recipients to find jobs within five years, a prospect that Fassett “utterly rejects” because it will force “millions of children” into poverty.
This summer, Church and Society leaders helped stage a Capitol Hill press conference to denounce the welfare reform bill. One Church and Society executive later joined Jesse Jackson, the National Organization of Women, and homosexual groups in demonstrating against the bill outside the White House.
Although opposed to Clinton and the Congress over welfare reform, Fassett supported the President’s veto of legislation banning partial-birth abortions. Admitting that most abortions in America were used as birth control and urging more support for adoptions, Fassett still insisted that the church had given his Board a “mandate” to oppose measures that “abridge the ability of women to choose.” For Fassett, “choice” includes even the controversial late-term abortion procedure, which involves puncturing the skull and suctioning out the brains of unborn babies.
Since the board’s defense of partial-birth abortions, “some people would wonder if we have Bibles in our pews in this chapel,” Fassett joked amid chuckles from the directors, who were seated in the chapel of the United Methodist Building. He acknowledged the unpopularity of many of the board’s positions with United Methodist churchgoers.
According to Fassett, the board’s positions regarding “property” aroused special ire from the church’s “upper middle-class” members, who he alleged are focused on their own pocket-books. They did not approve of the board’s opposition to tax cuts or support for increased environmental regulation. He also noted that “people don’t like our position” opposing the death penalty but promised that the board would stay its course.
Fassett boasted of the board’s role in shipping computers to Cuba, despite the U.S. embargo. Pastors for Peace, a United Methodist-supported group that supports the Castro regime, tried earlier this year to ship the computers without a permit. Customs officials seized the computers, until Fassett’s negotiations with the U.S. Treasury Department gained their release.
During those negotiations, hunger strikers with Pastors for Peace camped out in the United Methodist Building, from which they conducted their publicity campaign.
When Fidel Castro received the computers in September, he compared the beliefs of his communist government to the teachings of Jesus, after which he presented medals to the leaders of Pastors for Peace. Eliezer Valentin-Canstanon, a board staffer, personally accompanied the computers to Cuba and will oversee their use.
Fassett cited the computers’ arrival in Cuba as a victory, but he lamented that Congress’ failure to recognize homosexuals as a protected minority in the work place had been a “defeat” for the board. Before the bill’s loss by one vote in the Senate, Fassett had contacted members of Congress urging its passage.
Although Fassett himself was careful not to address the issue, board staffer Susan Yuk proclaimed in a statement distributed to directors that legislation opposing homosexual marriages had contradicted the United Methodist Book of Resolutions.
Specifically, Yuk claimed that the “Defense of Marriage Act,” which Congress passed overwhelmingly and which President Clinton signed, would deny shared pensions, guardian relationships, mutual powers of attorney, equal protection before the law, and protection of shared material resources to homosexual persons. She claimed that the Book of Resolutions asserts these unequivocal “rights” for homosexuals.
As part of its ongoing defense of homosexual “liberties,” the board conducts “liaison work” with Affirmation and Reconciling Congregations, two groups that advocate removing United Methodist opposition to homosexual practices.
The board’s building, strategically located across the street from the Capitol and the Supreme Court, houses not only United Methodist offices but a host of interlocking left-wing lobby groups.
They, along with the lobby offices of the Women’s Division and the Commission on Religion and Race, will all benefit from a $4 million refurbishment of the United Methodist building. Fassett concluded by defiantly defending the lobby positions of General Board of Church and Society: “If this advocacy of ours adversely critiques the national or international decision-makers, we make no apologies.” 
