God once opposed interracial marriage, too
In 1956, the white daughter of a Methodist minister was pushed out of her Methodist college for dating a black man. Margaret Sabin was summoned to the dean’s office at Nebraska Wesleyan University, where officials told Sabin that she had two choices: stop seeing Bill Thrasher, her new African-American boyfriend, or leave the university.
Sabin left. And the following year she wed Thrasher, a military policeman stationed in Nebraska. They had to travel to Iowa to get married, because Nebraska prohibited interracial unions. When Sabin died, in 2007, her obituary told a feel-good story of love and resilience defeating hatred and racism.
I thought of Sabin as I read about the United Methodist Church conference last week in St. Louis, where the nation's second-largest Protestant church voted to strengthen its ban on same-sex marriage. After three days of debate, the UMC doubled down on its long-standing policy that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”
But that’s precisely what many Christians said about interracial marriage, too, which was illegal in 16 states when the Supreme Court struck down those bans in its evocatively named Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967. Four years ago, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court likewise reversed state prohibitions on gay marriage. Yet many churches have been slow to follow, insisting that the Bible bars what the law allows.
“We do need to praise God and multiply and same-sex marriages will not allow us to multiply,” explained one delegate at the Methodist conference, defending the church’s policy. “If you do not agree with this, you are violating the law of the creator.”