Rejected Anti-Gay Ad

David Brauer reports that the Minneapolis StarTribune has rejected an ad placed by the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a conservative group within the Presbyterian Church (USA):

According to Committee president Carmen Fowler LaBerge, “The Strib indicated that if we would scrub the reference in our ad to sex within marriage and scrub the reference to the Bible, they would reconsider running it. Those edits would have so substantively changed the ad as to render it meaningless.”

LaBerge says the ad ran in big-city papers such as the Los Angeles Times (right), Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Charlotte Observer, Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronicle, Richmond Times-Dispatch and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here’s the ad in question:

As it seems to go these day, the Twin Cities are a hub of all things ecclesial, as CT has reported.  There was the time that God angrily knocked over a steeple with a tornado because Lutherans approved of gay ordination.  Then, this year, the vote by the Presbytery of the Twin Cities officially tipped the scales in favor of gay ordination.  And next month, the burgeoning reformist-but-possibly-schismatic group, Fellowship PC(USA), is meeting within spitting distance of my house (I wonder how John Piper will interpret severe weather during that meeting…).

All this is heating up in Minnesota, where we will be voting on a marriage amendment to the Minnesota Constitution in 2012.  I predict that we will be the first state to reject such an amendment — God knows I’ll be actively working for its defeat.