Earlier this spring, denominational officials had asked Presbyterians to hold off on making travel plans for Big Tent, which is scheduled for June 30-July 2 and features nine concurrent church-related conferences, including the National Multicultural Church Network Conference and the Racial Ethnic and Immigrants Convocation.
The request to delay travel bookings was based on the Indiana legislature’s consideration of a bill similar to a controversial immigration law in Arizona. The Indiana bill would, for example, have required police to ask for proof of citizenship or immigration status if they had a “reasonable suspicion” that someone they had detained was in the U.S. illegally.
If it had passed, that legislation would have conflicted with a 2010 General Assembly action that instructed its agencies to “refrain from holding national meetings at hotels in those states where travel by immigrant Presbyterians or Presbyterians of color or Hispanic ancestry might subject them to harassment” because of legislation similar to the Arizona immigration law.
As it turned out, the Indiana legislature passed a version of the bill that was sufficiently changed that PC(USA) officials say it won’t invoke the General Assembly prohibition.
“While the Indiana bill still contains objectionable language that we consider inhospitable and unjust toward immigrants, we are encouraged that the legislation in its final form falls short of the extreme measure of racial profiling,” Gradye Parsons, the PC(USA)’s stated clerk, said in news release issued by the Office of the General Assembly.
—Leslie Scanlon
