Windy City Times
March 7, 2012
by Joe Franco
From Windy City Times:
The Rev. Sid Mohn grew up on a rural Pennsylvania farm in roots deeply entrenched in both the conservative Dutch environment that he lived and in the Anabaptists that enveloped him. To Mohn, his entire childhood was spent connected to the church and he very early on felt a call to work within that establishment.
“It wasn’t until much later,” said Mohn, “that I came out and struggled deeply with the irrationality to continue to seek ordination in an organization that was predominantly exclusionary to gay men and lesbians.”
Mohn’s Anabaptist pedigree—their solemn critique of unfair or unjust social policy—took over.
“Just because society and the church oppose or condemn LGBTQ people is no reason to stay silent. I felt that I needed to complete my seminarian training,” he said.
The Presbyterian church rejected Mohn but the United Church of Christ actually asked him to serve and he was ordained a minister in that congregation.
“Getting a job full time in the church was just not possible. I believe I became ordained to not only say ‘there are gay men who are being ordained’ and as a symbol that there were openly gay people in the clergy,” said Mohn.
Mohn’s training and upbringing made work with the Chicago-based Heartland Alliance immediately attractive to him.
“I saw the service of people who are marginalized and typically the most excluded as the best opportunity,” he said. “I believed that I could translate my own person experiences with the social exclusion of so many.”
Mohn became president of Heartland in 1980. In 1981, the disease we now know as AIDS began to take its very early and immediate toll on large numbers of gay men—and others.
“I instantly recognized that this new ‘gay disease’ as it was branded at the time, had both public health and social justice issues that had to be dealt with,” said Mohn. “I wanted to insure that those living with AIDS and HIV had the respect they deserved as well as having all of their rights to treatment with dignity protected. I also recognized that at that time, there were no organized systems of care available to those living with AIDS and that only some hospitals had emergency care that could handle this new crisis. We at Heartland sought to define a continuum of care to respond to the multiple needs of those with HIV, such as basic healthcare, nutrition and housing,”
