Seminary arrests
Posted March 26, 2007
Members of gay group arrested at Kentucky seminary
By DYLAN T. LOVAN
Associated Press Writer
LOUISVILLE, Ky. --
Members of a gay-rights group were arrested Monday after staging a sit-in at a Louisville seminary whose president is drawing criticism for his comments on prenatal treatments that would influence a child's sexual orientation.
The group, Soulforce, made a surprise visit to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to attempt to meet with its president, the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., a leading Christian evangelical.
Twelve were charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor, and booked into jail, Louisville police said.
The sit-in lasted nearly two hours, said Jarrett Lucas, a co-director of a Soulforce tour that is visiting Christian colleges.
The group did not contact officials at the private campus in advance of the visit, said Lawrence Smith, the seminary's vice president of communications. Smith said a small group left when they were asked by police to leave, but about a dozen stayed. An Associated Press reporter was also escorted off the campus.
"As far as I could tell they were not unruly," Smith said. "It's my understanding that they did not resist arrest, but they refused to leave the campus when they were asked to leave."
Smith said Mohler was not on the campus during the protest.
Mohler irked gay-rights supporters by asserting in a recent article that homosexuality would remain a sin even if it were biologically based, and by his support for a hypothetical medical treatment that could switch an unborn gay baby's sexual orientation.
Mohler has said he wrote the article "intending to start a conversation." Lucas said group members wanted Mohler to rescind his comments and publicly apologize.
"Some of us were raised in a southern Baptist tradition, so for him to deny his own constituents simply a conversation - we wanted to go have him hear our voice - and we were denied that," Lucas said Monday. He was not one of the 12 arrested, he said.
Lucas said seminary officials told protesters that Mohler was too busy to meet with them. Lucas said the 12 would likely be released from the jail by Monday evening.
"He wasn't too busy to write a blog that said people who are gay don't deserve the right to live as they are," he said.
Mohler wrote in the March 2 blog that a discovery that homosexuality is biologically determined would not change "the biblical condemnation of all homosexual behaviors."
Members of Soulforce were arrested earlier this month during two days of protests at Oklahoma Baptist University.
The group, a nonprofit organization located in Lynchburg, Va., has organized several national tours to religious and military colleges across the country to protest attitudes about homosexuality at those institutions.
Lucas said the group has also planned a trip to the University of the Cumberlands in eastern Kentucky.
H/T: Caleb Powers