Ellin Jimmerson, a Baptist pastor in Huntsville, Alabama, said she was surprised when she was asked to perform one of Alabama’s first same-sex wedding ceremonies after the state overturned its ban on gay marriage. Although she has been supportive of the LGBTQ community, she’s best known for her immigration activism.
“I cannot get my head around what happened yesterday,” Jimmerson, 63, told The Huffington Post over the phone on Tuesday. “It wasn’t just a local story.”
Monday marked the first day same-sex weddings were legal in Alabama. Despite a direct mandate from U.S. District Judge Callie V.S. Granade, many probate judges throughout the state refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
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“For so long we thought of same-sex marriages as being a scandal, and then you add to that what people understand to be something called ‘biblical marriage,'” Jimmerson said. “[But] our idea of one man one woman in a union based on love just doesn’t appear in the Bible.”
“I think we just have to realize that we are cultural beings as well as religious people and we have to learn to draw a distinction between what we’re afraid of and insecure about and what God really demands of us — which is to love one another,” she said.
