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Baptist Church Sued When Active Homosexual Barred from Wedding Party

by Hilary White
 
SARNIA/LAMBTON, March 14, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Observer, the local paper for Sarnia/Lambton Ontario, reports that the pastor of a local church is in hot legal water for his defence of Christian principles.
 
Tamara Bourgeois, 29, and Jerry Condie, 34, were to marry in June 2007 at Sovereign Grace Community Church and have told the Observer that they are considering legal action against Pastor Glenn Tomlinson when he refused to allow an active homosexual to be part of the wedding party.
 
Tomlinson said he believes that allowing an unrepentant homosexual in the ceremony is tantamount to sanctioning homosexuality. "I'm OK with a gay person attending in the congregation. We are all sinners," Tomlinson told The Observer. "But the key to me is that a gay man is standing up in an official capacity. If we allowed that, we'd be sanctioning something in the actual ceremony."
 
Sovereign Grace church bills itself on its website as a church that "believes, teaches, and rejoices in the historic doctrines of Christianity."
 
Allowing a gay man to stand up for the couple would send the "wrong message, "Tomlinson said. "As a Baptist church, we believe that the scripture is God's word, without error."
 
Bourgeois was apparently expecting the pastor of this conservative congregation to be in full agreement with the liberal doctrines of "tolerance" for sin. Bourgeois reacted with indignant astonishment when Tomlinson said yes when she asked him if having a "gay man" in the wedding party would be a problem.
 
"He said it is a problem. I couldn't believe it. I can't be part of a church that feels this way."
 
"Shouldn't the church be about tolerance?" she asked
 
The "tolerance" dogma of liberalism, however, only goes in one direction. Having found another church more to her theological taste - one in agreement with her support of the homosexual political agenda - Bourgeois is vowing to use the courts to persecute Sovereign Grace church for their adherence to Christian doctrine.
 
I plan on taking this all the way. If I have the means for a civil suit, I'll sue for discrimination," she said, "Who attends at a wedding should have no bearing on the wedding itself. It's not like we're asking him to marry us and we're gay."

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