February 16, 2004

Time Magazine
Time & Life Building
Rockefeller Center
New York, NY 10020

Dear Editors:

We were extremely disturbed by the use of the disrespectful phrase “churning out gay 
marriages wholesale” in your February 9 article “Mainline Churches: Not Quite As Liberal 
As They Look.”  The marriages of same-gender couples are not “gay marriages” they are 
simply “marriages” and they are no more “churned out” than any other joyful or solemn 
religious occasion.  We trust that you would not apply such language to funerals, bat 
mitzvahs, baptisms, or the marriages of mixed-gender couples. Furthermore, in raising the 
question of which religious institutions are participating in the marriages of same-gender 
couples, and then answering it, “no major church offers a ritual for full-fledged gay
marriage,” you dismiss as unimportant any faith not identified by you as a “major church.”  
Marriage ceremonies are performed by individual congregations in the Presbyterian Church 
(USA) and other mainline denominations, despite policies banning them.  They are also 
performed as a matter of policy in the Metropolitan Community Church, the Ecumenical 
Catholic Church, Reconstructionist Judaism, Reform Judaism, and the Unitarian Universalist
Association, and in individual Quaker and United Church of Christ congregations. 


Sincerely,
Barbara Lamond Purdom			
Christopher Purdom
Interfaith Working Group Coordinators