LOVEboldly condemns Ohio House Bill 798: An assault on trans lives, introduced on the day set aside to celebrate them

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 31, 2026

Westerville, OH - Today, Trans Day of Visibility, one Ohio lawmaker introduced House Bill 798. The timing was not an accident. It was a statement. And we're making one too.

HB798 is a sweeping assault on the dignity, safety, and legal existence of Transgender and Nonbinary Ohioans. The bill would ban Trans people from using bathrooms, changing rooms, and overnight accommodations that match who they are. It would strip the ability to update sex markers on birth certificates, marriage certificates, and divorce decrees.

It would require sex as assigned at birth to be listed on birth certificates and death certificates, erasing a person's identity in the first document that marks their arrival in this world, and in the last document that marks their departure from it. And in a particularly cruel provision, it would protect employees who deliberately misgender their colleagues, enshrining disrespect as a legal right.

This is not a bill about bathrooms. It is a bill about erasure.

At LOVEboldly, we have spent fifteen years creating spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can flourish within their faith communities, spaces where they are seen, named, and beloved. We know what it costs to be unseen. We know what it means to have your identity denied, dismissed, or legislated out of existence. HB798 is the State of Ohio attempting to do precisely that.

The faith tradition we draw from compels us to name this for what it is: a failure of our common humanity and an act of targeted cruelty. To introduce this legislation on Trans Day of Visibility, a day set aside to honor Trans lives, Trans joy, and Trans resilience, is not merely insensitive. It is an act of contempt. It communicates, loudly and clearly, that Trans Ohioans should be afraid to be visible at all.

We refuse to accept that message. And we will fight this bill.

To our Trans siblings: you are seen. You are not a threat, a problem, or a political pawn. You are beloved. You belong in Ohio. You belong in our communities. You belong, fully and without apology. LOVEboldly stands with you today, on Trans Day of Visibility, and every day.

This statement may be attributed to the Rev. Dr. Ben Huelskamp, Executive Director of LOVEboldly.

About LOVEboldly

Founded in 2011 and celebrating its 15^th anniversary in 2026, LOVEboldly is an Ohio, faith-based nonprofit that exists to create spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can flourish in Christianity. Learn more about LOVEboldly’s work at www.loveboldly.org.

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LOVEboldly Condemns Supreme Court Ruling Undermining Protections for LGBTQIA+ Youth

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 31, 2026

Contact: Rev. Dr. Ben Huelskamp, Executive Director, LOVEboldly - bhuelskamp@loveboldly.org

LOVEboldly Condemns Supreme Court Ruling Undermining Protections for LGBTQIA+ Youth

Westerville, OH - Today, the United States Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to LGBTQIA+ children and teenagers across this country, ruling 8-1 to strike down Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for minors. We at LOVEboldly are heartbroken and we are not silent.

Let us be clear: conversion therapy is not therapy. It's not care. It's not love. It's a series of discredited, dangerous, and pseudoscientific practices that has been rejected by every major medical and mental health organization in this country. Study after study has shown that young people subjected to conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide. No constitutional argument changes that reality. Calling the psychological torment of a child "free speech" does not make it so.

We also reject, unequivocally, the theological framework that undergirds this practice. The God we know does not make mistakes. The God we worship breathed life into every LGBTQIA+ person and called them good, exactly as they are, exactly as they have always been. There is no divine mandate to erase, suppress, or convert the sacred identities of God's beloved children. Any theology that teaches otherwise is not good news. It is harm dressed in religious language.

To every LGBTQIA+ young person reading this today: you are not broken. You do not need to be fixed. You are loved by your Creator, and by this community without condition and without exception.

To the faith leaders, parents, and allies in Ohio and across this nation: this is a moment that demands more than sympathy. It demands solidarity. It demands that we use our voices, our pulpits, our platforms, and our relationships to protect the children in our communities. The courts have failed them today. We must not.

LOVEboldly will continue to create spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can flourish in their faith and in their full humanity. That work has never been more urgent.

This statement may be attributed to the Rev. Dr. Ben Huelskamp, Executive Director of LOVEboldly.

About LOVEboldly

Founded in 2011 and celebrating its 15^th anniversary in 2026, LOVEboldly is an Ohio, faith-based nonprofit that exists to create spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can flourish in Christianity. Learn more about LOVEboldly’s work at www.loveboldly.org.

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Job and God and Transitioning into Wildness

Tuesday, March 31, 2026 - Trans Day of Visibility

Jonathan L. A. Morgan

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

“Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass like an ox…

It is the first of the great acts of God; only its Maker can approach it with the sword…

Even if the river is turbulent, it is not frightened; it is confident though Jordan rushes against its mouth...

“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook or press down its tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever? …

On earth it has no equal, a creature without fear.It surveys everything that is lofty; it is king over all that are proud.”

Job 40:15, 19, 23; 41:1-4, 33-34 (NRSVUE)

Devotion

Today is Trans Day of Visibility. As a Trans theologian, I am drawn to one of the most strange, confusing, and ultimately real feeling stories of transition in the Bible, the Book of Job.

These verses about Behemoth and Leviathan are from the part of the Book of Job known as the “God speeches,” which happen after Job has lost nearly everyone and everything; and had his so-called friends (and a stranger) assure him that all these horrific things that have happened to him are his fault, and if he would just ‘get right with God,’ then he would be forgiven and all would be well again. Maybe Job’s experience feels familiar to you, especially considering how too many of our churches treat us in the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s easy to read the God speeches as God humbling Job, ‘putting him in his place;’ in fact, that’s how many people read it. But over a lifetime of pondering, and the intensive study I’ve been able to do as a theologian, I read these verses differently.

Job has been struggling up to this point to find a way out of the punishment-and-reward style of religion that his community practices, and that tells him he must have done something wrong to be punished so badly. God helps him reframe his understanding of the world and his own suffering. Here and in the rest of the God speeches, God isn’t bringing up these powerful and wild creatures and environment around them to make Job feel even worse after all his loss, pain, and the guilt-tripping of well-meaning but deeply misguided friends and strangers. Instead, God is telling Job that Job, too, is one of those wild and amazing creatures that God delights in.

My relationship with Job’s story, as I mentioned, goes “all the way back.” I was a young child when I played one of Job’s children in our church’s production of Archibald MacLeish’s “J. B.” In college, I pondered and wrote poetry on the God speeches for a class as my grandfather was dying; it had been a difficult few years for my mom’s family, as my uncle died suddenly, then my grandfather had his first debilitating stroke, and both he and my grandmother declined and then died a couple years later. I found the God speeches in the Book of Job reassuring then, and now decades later as I navigate life as a gay Trans man and proud seahorse dad who does not “pass.” Those speeches are deeply centering and decentering for me, assurance that I am part of something much bigger than myself – a whole planet – that the human community is not the only one that matters, that the society we live in is not the sole arbiter of what is ‘good and proper,’ that I am subject of the same divine regard as all the rest of creation.

And as the story of Job reminds us, bad things happen to all of us. We all know loss and grief, and I’d hazard that many of us understand trauma through personal experience, as well – especially as members of the LGBTQIA+ community living in a society and religious traditions that too often do not love us. God is with us through it all, just maybe not in the ways we’re often taught to believe: not to fix, but to console; not to coddle, but to exhort; not to punish, but to comfort; not to take power, but to motivate; not to insist we ‘get over it,’ but to grieve with us as we continue living.

The Book of Job gives us an example of something many of us are familiar with: fighting for ideas of ourselves and God that don’t mesh with the ideas of society around us. In the God speeches, God says to us, “You’re right, about yourself and about how I work in the world. I don’t hand out punishments and rewards. I delight in you, as I delight in all the wild and wonderful (and scary).” The invitation in the God speeches is to let the transition (!) happen; let ourselves be “re-wilded” by God into the fullness of our being as lesbian, ace, enby, intersex, bi/pan, gay, Trans, Queer and all the rest of our glorious alphabet soup of a community.

Reflection

1.    How does the thought that you are one of God’s “wild creatures” feel?

2.    What transition(s) have you experienced in your life and relationship with the Divine?

Action

Take a moment to sit with the ideas. What images, feelings, thoughts do they bring to you? If you’re inclined, write, draw, move your body, sing – whatever creative impulse you get – about it.