THE BELL CURVE:
Bible movie calls for total equality
By Joseph N. Bell
This weekend, Robin Voss will officially present a gift to her hometown of Newport Beach. That’s where, four years ago, she began to turn a dream into a miracle that will be opening over the next few weeks in 38 cities across the nation including — and especially — her own backyard.
The miracle is called “For the Bible Tells Me So,” a documentary film that will open for local audiences Friday at Edwards Westpark 8 theater in Irvine.
It all started when Voss, shopping for a church that better represented her feelings about the equal and respectful inclusion of gay people in Christian thinking, visited St. Mark Presbyterian in Newport Beach for a seminar titled “What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality.”
Expecting the usual literalist interpretation that requires celibacy for gay church membership and rules out gay clergy, she was startled to hear her own views reflected by the speaker, Rev. Steven Kindle, and to see animated discussion afterward among, she says, “people of great faith who had a gay friend or relative and were experiencing profound spiritual turmoil because they had heard only one perspective.”
She came away determined to pass along the message she had heard that day and decided the best means was a movie — brave words from someone with a long career in consumer marketing and zero knowledge of how to go about making a film.
But her determination was greater than the obstacles, especially after she found a young and talented director named Daniel Karslake who shared her vision and knew how to translate it to film.
The result is a documentary that has been winning accolades at various film festivals and premiered in New York last week at Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate church and will be available to Newport-Mesa audiences beginning this weekend.
I’ve seen the film and found it powerful without ever being contentious or patronizing.
Rather than too much dependence on talking heads — and there are some potent ones — it builds its primary case around four families with gay children and very different and compelling stories to tell.
And in the telling, it completely avoids the shrillness and repetition traps that waylay so many documentaries. It deals with a subject very much in public view these days in an even-handed manner that goes back directly to the theme of the seminar that started Robin Voss on her crusade.
So it seems highly appropriate that after the 4 p.m. screening, there will be a sold-out wine and cheese reception at St. Mark, followed by a question-and-answer session with Robin Voss and director Daniel Karslake.
St. Mark Pastor Gary Collins says, “We feel privileged to have this event at St. Mark. We think it is important to make it known that not all faiths reject gay people.
Since it was founded in 1962, St. Mark has always reached out to everyone, and our congregation today is unanimous on this issue. We ask only that gay people be treated the same as everyone else in our society, and we feel blessed that this film came out of a seminar held in our church.”
In following the divisiveness of this issue among churches in the Newport-Mesa community, we have mostly been exposed to the conventional literal Biblical view of homosexuality. “For the Bible Tells Me So” offers a welcome balance to those convictions. It is also a crackling good film.
It's a date!
