We Are A Welcoming Congregation!

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley is a Welcoming Congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and UUCB has a vibrant LGBT community. The UUA's Welcoming Congregation Program, from the Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Concerns, helps congregations to consciously examine homophobia, heterosexism and what it means for heterosexual people to be allies to people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. Unitarian Universalists actively honor the worth and dignity of all people.

Proposition 8’s passage was close. Our commitment to marriage equality is not close. Our support is a landslide, flowing down like waters, like tears, like justice.

As Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker said, and Dr. Martin Luther King repeated, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

This is where we place our hope and faith and trust. We join with the growing numbers of people courageously continuing to demand fairness, equality, and justice.

We will, as other ministers before us have done, no longer participate in the discriminatory act of signing marriage licenses for any couples until we can sign them for all couples.

We will joyfully officiate at the religious marriages of all couples who ask us to do so, and we will ask those who can legally marry to have a civil authority sign their license.

We take this step of conscience in the hope that hearts will be moved and justice will prevail.