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Imagine the scene: It’s the November 14 meeting of the PCUSA Presbytery of Newark (New Jersey). Business, we can imagine, is being conducted in a relatively unexciting and mundane way, the same as with most Presbyteries. Then comes announcement time.

A female pastor, The Rev. Ms. Laurie A. McNeill of Central Presbyterian Church, an average PCUSA congregation in Montclair, stands up to make an announcement. She wants to share some exciting news with her fellow ministers and elders in attendance.

We can imagine most Presbyters aren’t really paying that much attention, thinking maybe she is going to announce some upcoming event in the life of the Central congregation.

McNeill has been at the Central congregation as Pastor for several years. According to her bio on the church’s website, McNeill is a North Carolina native, a 1982 graduate of Wake Forest University and received her Master of Divinity from Princeton Seminary. She was ordained in 1989, served once as moderator of the body before which she stands and was once a commissioner to the denomination’s General Assembly.

Her announcement, as reported by The Presbyterian Outlook on Wednesday, November 18: she got married.

PCUSA pastors get married all the time. What made this announcement so significant was that McNeill, a female, married another woman. The ceremony, conducted by a UCC minister who grew up in the same North Carolina Presbyterian church as did McNeill, was held at Cape Cod on October 17.

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As a Christian and as a queer man and as a religious professional, I have long wrestled with the concept of what is typically called “hate crime legislation.” I’ve done so knowing that I was not in the larger company of GLBTQ individuals and to “come out” as just having genuine and serious questions raised the specter of being ostracized from polite GLBTQ society. It would be tantamount to questioning the work, for example, of the Human Rights Campaign (which some have done) or any other popular-at-the-time gay cause.

I even sponsored a discussion of “hate crime legislation” at the Unitarian Universalist congregation for which I used to work, having two gay men, each representing the opposing sides of that question, and I did catch a little flack from members of that fellowship for even presuming that there was more than one position to take on the issue.

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