Jul 29, 2005  |  By: EARTHA JANE MELZE  | COMMENTS     

MIDDLEBROOK, Va. — FBI officials confirmed this week that the agency is investigating an arson attack on a gay-friendly church in this rural Shenandoah Valley town.

Michael Foster, the supervisor working on the case, said the FBI is actively pursuing all angles, including the possibility that the arson was carried out by a member of a domestic terror organization that targets racial and other minorities, including gays.

St. John’s Reformed United Church of Christ was burned on July 9, just days after the UCC’s national conference passed a resolution backing equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. The text of the messages spray-painted on the church referred to this issue: “Gays lover,” “Lesb hell,” “UCC siners” and “sinners.”

“The writing on the wall, literally, tells the story,” Foster said, “This was a politically motivated attack because of the gay issue, and the FBI is going to investigate it.”

St. John’s is the third UCC church in the Shenandoah Valley that has been intentionally damaged in recent months.

“Two other attacks came after we launched the ‘God is Still Speaking’ campaign,” said Chuck Currie, a St. Louis-based UCC minister who maintains a blog on UCC issues.

The “Still Speaking” campaign included a commercial depicting a church welcoming gay congregants. NBC and CBS rejected the ad last year, Currie said, after the networks decided it had a political, rather than religious, message.

Although many UCC members believe that the earlier Virginia attacks were also motivated by the church’s pro-gay policies, only the Middlebrook case is currently under investigation by the FBI.

‘Correlation’ to religious right?
“I think there is a direct correlation between the rhetoric that has been unleashed by the political and religious right comparing [gay and lesbian] sexuality to murder or other violent crimes,” Currie said. “This gives people the political and theological cover to attack gay people and the churches that welcome them.”

In 2003, the most recent year for which data is available, the FBI investigated 284 hate crimes at places of worship. Of those, 34 were found to be motivated by race, 227 by religion, 11 by sexual orientation and 12 by ethnicity or national origin, according to Steve Kodak, a spokesperson for the FBI’s national office.

Generally, church arsons are down, Kodak said, and the FBI’s Arson Task Force, which was formed after a rash of church arsons in the 1990s, was disbanded in 2001.

In cases in which no one was physically hurt, the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996 provides for one year in jail for those found guilty of damaging religious property because of the religious characteristics of that property.

The federal hate crimes statute does not include protections based on sexual orientation, and the FBI does not track all crimes motivated by anti-gay bias.

The FBI does track politically motivated violence against groups, however, and since 2001 the agency has formed task forces with police to identify individuals and groups with political agendas and a propensity for violence, Foster said.

The state of Virginia does not have a statute with specific provisions for dealing with crimes motivated by anti-gay bias.

J.D. Underwood, acting supervisor for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms office in Roanoke, Va., said that arson investigations often take years.

After the Middlebrook attack, the News Virginian, a newspaper in Waynesboro, Va., published a story about the responses of three white supremacist groups to the arson.

In that story, Bill White, a Virginia-based spokesperson for the National Socialist Movement, also known as the American Nazi Party, condemned the arson but said that he understood how the actions of the United Church of Christ could provoke such a reaction.

White told the Blade that he believes homosexuality is a mental illness, and that the UCC is a “heretic” church.

“Their encouragement of homosexuality is simply a modern extension of their 200-plus-year history of anti-social, anti-white and anti-Southern activities,” White said.

The United Church of Christ was active in the anti-slavery movement, and was the first church to ordain women, African Americans and gays, according to Currie.

“Sometimes being first causes people to attack your churches,” Currie said, “but it also draws people to join them.”

Since approval of the UCC resolution supporting same-sex marriage rights, the UCC Web site has seen a record number of “find a church” searches performed by visitors, according to the denomination’s news service.

Earlier this summer, White wrote that “taking on” liberal churches should be a top priority for area Nazis.

White ...