DVD: “Marriage is reaffirmed each time a man and woman choose to make each other husband and wife…”

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Just weeks before upcoming statewide elections, Minnesota’s Catholic bishops, spearheaded by John Nienstedt of Minneapolis-St Paul, sent this DVD to every Catholic household in the state—400,000 in all at a cost of one million dollars, funded by an anonymous donation.

DVD: “At best, so-called ‘same-sex marriage’ is an untested social experiment, and at worst, it poses a dangerous risk with potentially far-reaching consequences.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Critics of Archbishop Nienstedt take issue with many of his assertions in the DVD, but they also question the timing of the DVD campaign, coming as it does just prior to the elections.

MARY LYNN MURPHY (Catholic Rainbow Parents): He is playing partisan politics from a tax-exempt pulpit. That is what he is doing. He skirts that issue because he doesn’t name a specific candidate, but he is in fact lobbying, right now. This is the time for the election. We all know that. He knows that. I think that’s very inappropriate, and he’s manipulating his flock in doing that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Of the three major party candidates for governor, only one—Republican Tom Emmer—supports an amendment to the state constitution that Nienstedt wants that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. While insisting that he isn’t endorsing Emmer, the archbishop made his preference clear.

DVD: “Marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and to protect this truth, it is time in Minnesota to let the people speak.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Would it have been more prudent or less controversial to have a longer conversation about this without the election looming to complicate matters?

REV. DAVID MCCAULEY (Minnesota Catholic Conference): I don’t know that we can answer that question.

DE SAM LAZARO: Father David McCauley of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, which represents the bishops, says as religious leaders they have a responsibility to speak out on timely moral issues of the day.

MCCAULEY: Thirty-one states have addressed the topic of gay marriage, and there can be no denial that it has become very much a topic of conversation in both national and state conversation, and I can see why they would want to make Catholic people aware of Catholic teaching at this time and culture.

DE SAM LAZARO: So far some 2500 people turned their DVDs in to a group that promised to bring them back to the bishop. Another 1000 were returned to sender directly and hundreds to a local artist creating a sculpture with them. Among the most vigorous opponents are Michael Bayly with a group representing Catholics from sexual minorities and Mary Lynn Murphy with a group called Catholics Rainbow Parents.

MURPHY: In those DVDs he says straight out that our children are second-class citizens—the parents of gay children—our kids are second-class citizens and don’t deserve the rights that other American have.

MICHAEL BAYLY: Now some would say that, oh, if they were speaking out on immigration reform or civil rights wouldn’t you think that that would be an appropriate thing for them to do, and of course I would. But the difference I see is that in all of those cases, the efforts to speak out, the end result is to broaden the circle, to expand the circle, and to include others in, whereas in this case, with the anti-gay marriage campaign, they’re seeking to exclude a huge part of the population, not just Catholics.

DVD: “The Church’s teaching on marriage is not a condemnation of homosexual persons as human beings. It is simply a reflection not only of the scriptures, but of the unique, procreative nature of the male-female bond.”

MCCAULEY: The teachings of the church regarding sexuality are the same for heterosexual people as they are for gay people. The church has always stated that the genital expression of sexuality is limited to those who are married, who have entered into that solemn covenant with one another to be faithful and to be supportive of one another and are open to share in God’s work of creation and that those things are not possible in a gay marriage.

DE SAM LAZARO: Nienstedt has long been outspoken on the issue of gay marriage, often battling in public with gay activists like Bayly. But Bayly says that debate has widened.

BAYLY: It’s no longer the usual suspects who are, you know, talking about this. It’s the rank-and-file Catholics, and they’re doing it, you know, by the hundreds and perhaps by the thousands within this archdiocese.

DE SAM LAZARO: One of those Catholics is Father Michael Tegeder, who ministers to a suburban Twin Cities parish. In a public letter he took issue with the archbishop’s contention that gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage. He says the real threat to marriage is poverty.

REV. MICHAEL TEGEDER: The political candidates don’t need that kind of issue out there when we’re faced with other real significant issues that they can do something about. The constitutional amendments are very unrealistic. It’s not going to happen.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says the response from parishioners and others has been overwhelmingly positive, even from some unlikely places.

TEGEDER: They’re coming from such hotbeds of radicalism like Ramsey, Minnesota; Montgomery, Minnesota; Hastings, Minnesota.

DE SAM LAZARO: Surveys show that Catholics are almost evenly divided on gay marriage, although a clear majority now favors civil unions.

TEGEDER: I have a responsibility to my parishioners to speak, you know, for their concerns. So often in these cases if I don’t say something, I hear from my parishioners saying you are the pastor. You are the priest. You are to speak for us.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tegeder has not been reprimanded by the archbishop, but Nienstedt turned down Tegeder’s request that he meet with concerned Catholics.

TEGEDER: We have a lot of people who are in same-sex relationships in our communities, our Catholic communities, and the DVD campaign was very hurtful to them and to their families and friends and to many other Catholics.

DE SAM LAZARO: In an editorial, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said, “The church’s tax-exempt status could be threatened if it directly endorsed candidates. But instead it’s endorsing a policy outcome that’s entirely consistent with its theology in the same way Catholics have campaigned for decades to outlaw abortion.” But even though it’s generated controversy, most political analysts say the DVD campaign won’t have much impact on the election outcome. Most voters seem far more concerned about the economy.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in St. Paul.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We continue today our pre-election series on politics 2006 — on the air and on our Web site, where there is now a special area devoted to religion and politics. This week, the story of a radical change that appears imminent in Minnesota’s fifth congressional district in Minneapolis. A seat long-held by a Norwegian-American is likely to be taken over in the November election by an African American Muslim. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The legacies of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale still loom large in Minneapolis — a city with a reputation for lily-white, liberal, and often maverick politics. Minnesota’s fifth district could soon elect not just the state’s first black member of congress. He’d be the nation’s first Muslim congressman.

KEITH ELLISON (Democratic Congressional Candidate, Minnesota’s Fifth District, speaking to supporter): Can the president authorize illegal surveillance on American citizens in violation of FISA?

DE SAM LAZARO: Keith Ellison says he’s comfortable in church, synagogue or mosque. He’s a lawyer and a state representative who grew up Catholic in Detroit. He converted at 19 before moving to Minnesota and is observant of Muslim tenets, including fasting during Ramadan and praying five times a day. His politics, however, are not conservative.

Mr. ELLISON (speaking to group): You are the people who don’t care if somebody calls you a bleeding heart, right? Right?

DE SAM LAZARO: In this largely urban district, the 43-year-old father of four won a crowded Democratic primary race for a seat vacated by a retiring incumbent.

Professor LARRY JACOBS (Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota): The fifth congressional district, where Ellison was running, is one of the most liberal Democratic districts in the country, and Ellison was the most liberal candidate in the Democratic primary on issues such as health care. He was the one who supported the single payer approach. On the issue of the Iraq war, he was the one who favored a quicker withdrawal from Iraq.

DE SAM LAZARO: But Jacobs says what really clinched Ellison his primary victory was support from a community few politicians ever thought to tap — Muslims. Minneapolis’s Muslim population isn’t the largest in North America, but it’s grown substantially in recent years. The city, for example, has the largest Somali population in North America. These new Americans haven’t been politically active, but they were galvanized by Ellison’s candidacy.

Mr. ELLISON: They are looking for their representatives to really stand up for due process and the rule of law. The whole idea of profiling people because of what they look like or the countries they come from or their accent is something that I think the Muslim community is concerned about. And I’ve been concerned about racial profiling for many years and introduced bills on it in the state legislature and advocated to have it prohibited even before I was in the state legislature.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ellison’s support did not waiver despite a series of stories about his past.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER (to Ellison during debate, Twin Cities Public Television): There are reports about your failure to amend campaign finance reports. Of course, folks know about this number of parking tickets, moving violations, and your suspended driver’s license. But I’m curious, how should voters view all that?

Mr. ELLISON: Of course, these kinds of things are important, and I apologize, and I should have paid better attention. But the fact is at the end of the day people want to know, are you going to work for them? Do you care about them?

DE SAM LAZARO: But the most stinging criticism came over Ellison’s one-time support for the Nation of Islam and his writings in praise of its often anti-Semitic leader, Louis Farrakhan. Ellison’s Republican opponent, marketing professor Alan Fine, is Jewish.

Professor ALAN FINE (Republican Congressional Candidate, Minnesota’s Fifth District, during debate, Twin Cities Public Television): I don’t think he’s fit to be in Congress. You know, if we have someone who has been part of a hate group following somebody who, like Louis Farrakhan…

Mr. ELLISON (during debate): I’ve never been a part of any sort of a hate group. It’s just a complete distortion, misrepresentation of the truth.

Prof. FINE (during debate): Keith Ellison wrote articles praising Louis Farrakhan in the early ’90s. Is that true, Keith? Did you write those articles?

Mr. ELLISON (during debate): Yes, I did. But I also explained that I’ve come about a new point of view on this issue when more information came to my attention.

Prof. JACOBS: I give him high scores for damage control. Ellison pretty systematically went through the district and other parts of the Twin Cities meeting with Jewish leaders, meeting in temples, holding forums, and talking to a good number of Jewish leaders and members of the community, and I think he put to rest a lot of the concerns.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ellison has campaigned well outside his base — the Muslim and African- American communities. After Catholic mass last Sunday, for example, he went to the Lyndale United Church of Christ, a congregation that strongly supports gay marriage.

Mr. ELLISON (speaking to congregation): Just like we should not make laws, enshrine in the Constitution law that says that people of different colors can’t be married; that states should not decide who gets married based on sex either.

DE SAM LAZARO: His liberal stance on social issues like gay marriage has sometimes put Ellison at odds with his traditionally conservative Muslim constituency. He says he’s responded unapologetically.

Mr. ELLISON: I said, “Look, you know, as a Muslim, you’re getting visits from law enforcement officials, and you haven’t done anything. You’ve heard about relatives being stopped in the airport. You feel vulnerable at this time. Do you want to be the one to say who should not have rights, if you understand what I mean?”

DE SAM LAZARO: In a district that George Bush lost by a 70-30 margin last time, most political analysts say Ellison is a strong favorite to win on November 7.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred De Sam Lazaro in Minneapolis.