United Methodist Women Protest North Carolina “Bathroom” Law

United Methodist Women (UMW) announced its official stand against North Carolina’s “Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act” law (HB2) in a press release issued August 17 via Religion News Service. Once again the 150-year-old ladies’ mission group within the United Methodist Church (UMC) demonstrates its leftist priorities by protesting a state law maintaining sex-specific bathroom facilities and privacy rights, even in the midst of a major catastrophe.

Historic torrential flooding is devastating Louisiana. My Methodist grandmother told my father over the phone that “she’s lost everything” in her submerged East Baton Rouge home. The Washington Post reports the Red Cross is calling this the “worst natural disaster” since Hurricane Sandy. But where is the UMW headquarters’s attention? Bathrooms and transgender agendas.

“This decision makes me proud to be a United Methodist Women member,” commented Joann Barbour, president of the North Carolina Conference UMW in the group’s press release.

So exactly how will UMW stand against HB2? The group’s protest efforts include plans to “hold an action” (hold a rally, press conference, or petition drive?) against HB2 during the group’s Leadership Development Days training in Charlotte, North Carolina next January. Also, UMW is moving its May 2017 Mission u training event from Charlotte to Jacksonville, Florida “in protest of the law.”

Predictably, Harriett Jane Olson, UMW chief executive officer, likens UMW’s anti-HB2 protest to the righteous efforts of the civil rights movement. Olson claims, “Discrimination in employment and public accommodation based on sexual orientation today is no more acceptable than discrimination based on race was 75 years ago.”

Olson argues further:

In 1942 our predecessors stood against racial segregation and moved the Assembly from St. Louis, Missouri, to Columbus, Ohio, so that black and white members could stay in the same hotels. Today’s decision is a current application of the same principle, caring for all our members, paying attention to where and how we spend their Mission Giving and standing with those who are oppressed.

The press release goes on to insist UMW’s stand against North Carolina’s privacy law isn’t merely about public restrooms and locker rooms. The mission group claims HB2 also includes discriminating employment laws. The fact is, under HB2 employers cannot discriminate on basis of race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, or handicap. What agitates liberals within UMW leadership is HB2 clarifies a protected class of sex is based on “biological sex.”

UMW’s misdirected social actions aren’t helping its declining membership. Moving the location of an event happening next year as an act of protest takes little effort. Such actions are ineffective, near irrelevant. But a Christian ladies’ mission group that, say, organizes volunteers, provides meals, or channels funding to aid local Methodist churches sheltering displaced people evacuated from their flooded homes is a group that will remain relevant in hearts and minds.

As I reported in my June 2016 post “Ever-Declining United Methodist Women a Warning Sign,” UMW needs to adjust its left-wing policies to maintain faithful Methodist ladies as members. Latest data from the UMC’s General Council on Finance and Administration shows UMW membership in 2013 fell to 513,340 and in 2014 landed at 480,066 members.

Since its peak membership of 1.36 million members in 1974, UMW has lost 64 percent of its total membership.