Local Churches Front And Center In Gay Marriage Movie

It's one of the most shopworn cliches of the gay rights movement—the angry religious leader, usually Christian, denoucing LGBT people as "perverts" or a danger to the stability of society.

Even in Minnesota, that trope has continued to play itself out with the state's Catholic bishops helping lead the charge to pass a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The state already has a similar law on the books, but the amendment would make it hard for a future legislature to reverse it or for a court to find the law unconstitutional.

One local filmmaker, though, wants to change that.

"The religious right owns faith when it comes to issues like this," Matt Peiken  told Patch. "There's an imbalance here that I wanted to correct."

Disclosure: I used to work under Peiken when he was a Patch editor supervising Southwest Minneapolis Patch. He kept his film project separate from his work for Patch, however, and the former did not influence the latter.

As the marriage amendment fight gathers steam and reaches a climax in November, Peiken will be interviewing religious leaders and people of faith from across the state, starting here in Southwest Minneapolis. From those hours of tape, Peiken will be creating a series of mini-documentaries and posting them on his project's website, called Faith Forward. He hopes voters will share those short videos with their friends, hopefully sparking conversations and change.

"To defeat this amendment, we need to secure the support of around 140,000 people," Peiken said. "By introducing them to credible voices of faith they can relate to, they might go 'huh.'"

That brief moment of contemplation, he added, could help them change their minds and oppose the amendment. 

So far, Peiken has mixed attention towards well-known activist congregations like Lynnhurst's Shir Tikvah synagogue with a look at local Catholics quietly pushing back against Archbishop John Neinstadt's support for the amendment. Peiken's video showing those Catholic's anti-amendment music video is posted above. 

Peiken said he hopes to expand that through Greater Minneasota using a Kickstarter campaign  to raise money to help him travel the state, seeking out religious opponents of the amendment in towns large and small. The Kickstarter campaign runs through June 7.

"If we don't reach outside the Twin Cities, we'll loose this fight," Peiken said.