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.

Hosanna

Sunday, March 29, 2026

The Rev. Amy Aspey

Allied Person of Faith

Quote

“The people were hoping he would be a mighty warrior chief, like their ancestor Much Loved One (David), to set them free from the People of Iron (Romans.) But he did not ride a warhorse on that day, as one might expect. Instead, he rode a small, humble donkey colt. He came weeping over the Village of Peace (Jerusalem), but even this could not silence the hopes of the crowd. The people encircle him, front and back. ‘Hosanna! Set us free!’ they shouted.’”

-Mark 11:8-9 (First Nations Version)

Devotion

On that first Palm Sunday, the gathered community was weary from the oppression of the Roman Empire. Their bodies were exhausted from living in fear of violence, hate and death. Their souls were tired from grief and heartache. It’s not hard 2,000 years later for us to imagine this kind of weariness. What words describe how you feel today?

In solidarity with the suffering of every time and place, Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Maybe, holy anger boosts Jesus onto the donkey, outrage with the unjust systems that prey on the poor, rule by domination, and glorify violence so that victory is equated with blessedness. The Blessed One, who comes in the name of the Lord, intentionally rides a donkey to symbolize peace and that the Kin-dom of God operates dramatically different from the empire. In an act of grace, Jesus rides into Jerusalem knowing that death is the outcome and is willing to die so that all might live. As a servant and not as tyrant, Jesus embodies love in ways that shock those at the first Palm Sunday and in many ways surprise us still. In what ways does Jesus surprise you?

When the crowds shout, Hosanna, this isn’t a superficial ‘praise the Lord.” It’s a cheer. But it’s not cheery. It’s a cry of praise that holds in tension desperation and hope. Hosanna is an ancient cry from the psalms that means, “Save Us.” God, save us. God, deliver us. With branches waved high, the people know that God liberated them before and this is a cry to do it again. Find a spot to shout, Hosanna, from the top of your lungs. As you shout, remember that you do not cry out alone, we cry out together. And God hears us.

Holy week is God’s response to Hosanna! It is the story of how God saves us- both all of Creation forever and ALL of us over and over and over again. Holy Week begins with Jesus riding into Jerusalem armed with nothing but love. This wasn’t at all what the people expected.

In an indigenous translation of Mark 11:8-9, the First Nations Version says, “The people were hoping he would be a mighty warrior chief, like their ancestor Much Loved One (David), to set them free from the People of Iron (Romans.) But he did not ride a warhorse on that day, as one might expect. Instead, he rode a small, humble donkey colt. He came weeping over the Village of Peace (Jerusalem), but even this could not silence the hopes of the crowd. The people encircle him, front and back. ‘Hosanna! Set us free!’ they shouted.’”

Hosanna is a song of praise that rises out of a hope-full and weary people who are longing to be filled. Hosanna is a one-word hymn that is defiant about hope and shouts to God, Save us. Palm Sunday proclaims that God saves us. Not in a way that we expect but in the way that we need. And, my God, the world needs saving.

Hosanna! Jesus, save us from violence. Free us from hate. Deliver us from evil. Liberate us from an obsession with weapons. Save us from exhaustion, cynicism, and consumerism. Deliver us from racism, homophobia, Transphobia, xenophobia, and sexism. Free us from toxic relationships and participation in the perpetuation of injustice. Save us from ways of seeing the world that aren’t aligned with Your vision for us.

Reflection

What makes you cry out? Hosanna!

Action

I wonder if as Jesus prepared himself to enter Jerusalem, he centers himself with the reminder that his identity as Beloved Child of God will survive even this. Look at your beautiful face in the mirror and trust that your identity as Beloved Child of God will survive, too. Always.

Welcome to Holy Week where a weary and defiantly hope-full people cry out and Jesus shows us that Love saves us, every. Single. Time. Hosanna!