NY Journal News

By KEITH EDDINGS
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: June 13, 2004)

MOHEGAN LAKE ­ After sitting out most of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to her everlasting regret, Unitarian minister Dawn Sangrey decided to fill that gap in her life by plunging into the battle over gay marriage.

She began by joining another Unitarian minister to marry 13 gay couples in New Paltz on March 6, one day after the state Supreme Court ordered the village's 26-year-old mayor to stop performing the ceremonies. Since then, she's traveled to New Paltz several times to perform about two dozen more same-sex marriages, making her a criminal in the eyes of the Ulster County district attorney and a hero to the tiny congregation she leads in Mohegan Lake.

"I had a chance to go to Birmingham and I hadn't gone and I always regretted it," Sangrey said, recalling the five-day march from Selma to Birmingham, Ala., led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, while she was teaching English at Pelham Memorial High School. "I did other kinds of things in the civil rights movement, but I didn't go to Washington. I didn't go to Birmingham. I didn't do what some other activists did at the time. The thing that kept me from doing more was fear. I don't want to be afraid anymore."

Gay marriage is anathema to the Catholic Church. Most mainline Protestant denominations are deeply split on the issue. But Unitarian Universalists like to boast that they have been performing commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples for at least 30 years. Still, Sangrey took the Unitarians farther than they had gone before when she performed marriages in New Paltz by declaring that she was acting for the state as well as the church.

That distinction wasn't missed by Ulster County District Attorney Donald Williams, who asked Sangrey and the Rev. Kay Greenleaf of Poughkeepsie, a Unitarian minister who joined Sangrey in New Paltz, to meet with him in his Kingston office March 11 to "clarify any ambiguity" about whether they intended the marriages to be civil.

"I think he wanted us to say we didn't mean it, we were just doing a religious thing here, it's OK," Sangrey said. "He was clearly uncomfortable about charging clergy and we did not let him off the hook. He said he wanted the weekend to think about it. So we went back to New Paltz and did some more weddings."

Four days later, Williams charged Sangrey and Greenleaf with 13 counts of solemnizing marriages for couples who did not hold marriage licenses, a misdemeanor. The charges made them the first ministers in the nation to face criminal prosecution in connection with a same-sex marriage, setting the stage for a landmark legal battle pitting government against religion on the issue for the first time.

The first skirmish ended Thursday, when New Paltz Town Justice Jonathan Katz issued a ruling in a related case that will be a landmark if it survives an appeal. Katz dismissed identical charges that District Attorney Williams brought against New Paltz Mayor Jason West for the marriages he performed Feb. 27, ruling that New York's marriage laws are unconstitutional because they discriminate against gays and that the state has no legitimate interest in banning gay marriage. On Friday, a second town judge scheduled a hearing for June 25 on a motion Sangrey and Greenleaf have filed to dismiss their case on similar grounds.

Williams disputes that the case even involves constitutional issues ­ he says it's only about performing marriages without licenses ­ and he says likening the illegal marriages to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s is a "sad and strained" analogy.

"I respected the two ministers' willingness to take a position on something they feel strongly about," Williams said about their meeting. "But unfortunately, they have been misdirected and misguided."

Sangrey's congregation in Mohegan Lake and Greenleaf's in Poughkeepsie have rallied to their sides.

A sermon Sangrey delivered the day after performing the first ceremonies received an ovation at the church. The next week, 13 members traveled with her to New Paltz for her arraignment. The congregation also offered to take up a collection to pay for Sangrey's defense, but her lawyer is representing her without charge.

"People were 100 percent behind her and very enthusiastic," said Claire McNeill, a Yorktown Heights resident who has been a member of the church for 30 years, recalling the reaction to Sangrey's sermon about the marriages. "There was a round of applause. Tears. Hugs. A hundred percent approval."

While the issue wends its way through the New Paltz court, Sangrey is continuing to perform the marriages a few blocks away under a tent beside the Walkill River. She's also coping with her newfound celebrity.

She's given dozens of interviews to local and national news organizations, was a guest of honor at the TriBeCa Film Festival the week a film about gay marriage opened and has been invited to march in gay pride parades from Albany to New York City, including Rockland's today (she and Greenleaf declined the invitation because they'll be preaching about gay marriage at a Unitarian church in Water Mill on Long Island.) Letters and e-mails are pouring in, as are invitations to speak to other Unitarian congregations, which she is now booking into next year. A 24-year-old son she raised with two other children in Bedford Hills with her husband, retired publisher Paul Fargis, has told her that his friends think she's a hero.

She declines the accolade.

"I found out I had been charged by hearing it on the radio," Sangrey recalled. "I'm driving along. I hear this on the radio. I pull in my driveway. Behind me pulls a TV truck. I came in the house and 12 other (reporters) had already left voice mails. I'm a pretty private person, pretty introverted, so the whole business of being a celebrity was unsettling to me. It makes me feel exposed. But part of the work is to give the issue visibility and articulation."

It's been a transition-by-fire for the daughter of a Methodist minister and a church musician who raised her to stay out of trouble and keep her head down while growing up Lancaster, Pa. She received an English degree from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1963, earned master's degrees in English and in writing and then taught English in Pelham and Scarsdale public schools until 1972. She left Scarsdale to write and edit college texts for publishers in New York City, taught English as an adjunct at Westchester Community College and turned to the ministry at age 56 in 1998.

She was ordained by a Unitarian congregation in Carlisle, Mass., in 1999 and received a degree from Harvard Divinity School two years later. The Fourth Unitarian Society of Westchester in Mohegan Lake hired her as a consulting minister last year and recently offered her a position as its first in-house minister since 1961.

Daniel Wagner, president of the society, said he expects Sangrey will fit in well at a congregation that in recent years has joined campaigns for affordable housing, the rain forest, migrant labor and abortion rights.

"She's a modern Unitarian minister," Wagner said. "That means one who's willing to listen to all viewpoints, who sees the ministry as shared by all people rather than standing up there in the pulpit and making pronouncements."

Not that she's unwilling to make them. Four decades after skipping the civil rights marches on Birmingham and Washington out of a fear for her safety, Sangrey said she never flinched when District Attorney Williams implied that she could avoid prosecution for performing the same-sex marriages if she would say she was acting only for her church.

"The affidavit underscores the intent for it to be a legal, binding document ­ binding on the state, binding on the Social Security Administration, binding on the emergency room nurse who won't let you in to see your spouse of 25 years because you're not married," Sangrey said, referring to the documents she signs for each couple she marries.

"That's where we need to go," she said. "We need to be able to say to gay couples, 'You can adopt a child and then move to another state and be sure that the state's not going to come after you and take away your kid.' That's got to stop."