Jacob Reitan has a resume his parents look at with pride: Graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University. Accepted a full-ride scholarship to Harvard Divinity School. Arrested seven times.
Not only are Reitan's parents proud of the arrests, but his mother, Randi Reitan, has been arrested right along with him.
"I joke, but it's true - they've been arrested more for gay rights than I have," said Jacob Reitan.
At age 24, Reitan has become a noted advocate in the Twin Cities for the rights of gays and lesbians, and his national influence is growing, as well. This month, he showed up at the Minnesota National Guard's Roseville recruitment office to enlist, testing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward homosexuals.
The recruiters didn't ask, but Reitan was ready to tell them he was gay. It didn't get to that point, though; his enlistment is on hold until the court cases on his arrests are completed or closed.
Reitan said his appearance at the enlistment office was not just a piece of propaganda. He says it would be an honor to serve his country in the military.
Tests and protests are nothing new to Reitan. Borrowing techniques from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he organized "Equality Ride," a two-month series of sit-ins and peaceful demonstrations at religious schools and military academies nationwide.
The ride was an attempt to draw attention to school policies that treat homosexual students differently. The demonstrations took him from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (where both he and his mother were arrested) to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University (ditto on the arrests) to Brigham Young University and numerous places in between.
"He has remarkable intuitions about doing justice," said the Rev. Mel White, a California pastor and author of "Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America."
"He's also the most articulate person you've ever met," said White, who has become a friend of the Reitan family. "You can hate him, but you can't stop listening."
Jacob Reitan - most call him "Jake" - was born in 1982. His father, Phil, had a law practice in Mankato, Minn., and the Reitans were the very picture of a "typical" American family: Working husband, homemaker wife, three sons, one daughter.
Reitan "came out" to his parents in his junior year of high school, after telling his older sister a year earlier. "I knew it would be like dropping a bomb on my parents," he said.
"We were surprised," his mother recalled. "We had no idea he was gay, and we didn't know anyone who was gay. We cried for a long time because we didn't understand homosexuality at all. The only thing we knew about it was that these people lived closeted lives."
She said the family sought counseling to try to understand their son. While he still hadn't told anyone at school, classmates and others suspected he was gay.
"Jake's windshield was broken in the school parking lot. There was a brick that went through my husband's law office window," Randi Reitan said.
"I did not sleep until I heard Jake come home" at night, she said.
When he came out before his senior year, the community ignored the family.
"That silence was deafening," she said.
About halfway through his senior year of high school, Reitan's parents came to a conclusion. "Phil and I looked at each other and said we just can't sit back and let Jake fight the discrimination alone," Randi Reitan said.
A family of activists was born. After Jacob Reitan graduated, the family moved to the Twin Cities.
The Lutheran family always had been spiritual, but they came to believe their church was condemning of gays and lesbians.
In the course of her research into the intersection of religion and homosexuality, Randi Reitan learned about Soulforce, an organization that sought to fight oppression against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. It was founded by White and his partner, Gary Nixon.
In 2001, she read that people from Soulforce would be attending that year's convention of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Indianapolis. By this time, her son was a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., majoring in political science and communication studies.
Also by this time, Jacob Reitan's faith had faded. Increasingly, he saw religion not as a source of hope for gays and lesbians but as a source of oppression. His parents persuaded him to attend the ELCA conference with them.
White said that when he met Reitan, "he'd given up on religion entirely. ... He discovered that part of him was atrophying because he was so angry."
The Reitans got involved in Soulforce. Soon, Jacob Reitan was organizing the Equality Ride protest tour, targeting schools, almost all of them religious, that Soulforce contends has discriminatory policies against gays.
While the reactions of university administrators ranged from welcome to contempt, students at the schools almost universally gave him a good reception, Reitan said.
Reitan is part of a generation of theologians, historians and scholars rethinking Christianity's centuries-old view that homosexuality is a sin. That belief, they contend, is based on incomplete or erroneous interpretations of scriptures. It is a discussion that's raging in church communities, from parish halls to national assemblies.
He will begin classes this fall at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. He says that even though a grandfather and an uncle were Lutheran pastors, he doesn't plan to go into the ministry. Rather, he wants a religious education because he believes the battle for equality for gays and lesbians must begin in a religious context.
"We've got to spend time talking about religion to make our case. 'Loving the sinner and hating the sin' is too hollow of a concept of love," he said.
A desire to serve his country drove Reitan to test the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy by trying to enlist in the National Guard, he said.
The 1993 policy ended the U.S. military's longtime outright ban on allowing homosexuals to serve. But there were conditions: Recruiters couldn't ask about a person's sexual orientation, and a recruit was expected to keep his or her sexual orientation private.
Reitan believes it is wrong that he - a fit, educated and willing enlistee - isn't allowed to serve in the military because he is gay. That he's unable to serve when the nation is at war is particularly galling, Reitan said.
Although the recruiters wouldn't ask about his sexual orientation, he had planned to make it clear to the recruiters and figured the enlistment process would stop right there.
"We want to get the denials in hand and show the people of Minnesota," he said. "This is really a conversation that has to happen between the people of Minnesota and their representatives in Congress."
Asked to describe what makes Reitan an effective organizer and leader, White ponders it a moment, lets out a laugh and launches into his reply.
"His weakness is his strength," he said. "He's fearless. At the same time, he's absolutely obdurate, absolutely unbending. He will compromise only when he's convinced."
