Presbyterians Vote to Allow Same-Sex Marriages

While votes are still required in each local presbytery, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted on Thursday to change its constitution’s definition of marriage from “a man and a woman” to “two people,” and to allow its ministers to perform same-sex marriages.  The change will likely trigger hate and division in local presbyteries as far right elements selectively cling to hand picked passages even as the ignore the larger Gospel message.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the development.  Here are highlights:

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted at its General Assembly on Thursday to change its constitution’s definition of marriage from “a man and a woman” to “two people,” and to allow its ministers to perform same-sex marriages where it is legal.

Both measures, passed by large majorities, are a reversal for a church that in 1991 and in 2008 barred its pastors from performing same-sex marriages, and that has held ecclesiastical trials for ministers who violated the ban and blessed gay couples.

The Presbyterian Church, a historic mainline Protestant denomination that spans a broad spectrum from liberal to conservative evangelicals, has been mired in the debate over homosexuality for about three decades. The General Assembly’s decision in 2010 to ordain openly gay ministers caused many congregations, including some of the largest, to depart.

“There were some of us with tears of joy, and some of us with tears of grief,” said the Rev. Susan De George, stated clerk of the Hudson River Presbytery, in New York, a lesbian minister who years ago was among those brought up on charges for blessing same-sex unions. “After the vote, the first thing I did was to text a friend on the other side of the issue.”

But changing the definition of marriage in the church’s Book of Order would still require ratification by a majority of the church’s 172 regions, or presbyteries — a yearlong process. At the assembly in Detroit, the measure passed overwhelmingly — 71 percent to 29 percent — but only after an amendment that altered the language of the change from “two people” to “two people, traditionally a man and a woman,” a nod to conservatives who would otherwise have voted against it.

The Presbyterians follow other religious groups that have taken similar steps, including the United Church of Christ, which affirmed “equal marriage rights for couples regardless of gender” in 2005; Quakers; the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations; and the Reform and Conservative movements in Judaism.

The vote giving discretion to ministers to marry gay couples takes effect on Sunday, at the close of the General Assembly.

[I]t deeply pained those Presbyterian commissioners in the church’s conservative wing, who warned that congregations that have been on the brink of departure would leave.

About 350 of the denomination’s congregations have left since 2010, when the General Assembly voted to ordain openly gay clergy members, said the Rev. Gradye Parsons, the church’s stated clerk, in an interview. But it is still the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination, with 10,038 churches in 2013 and about 1.8 million members.

With respect to the "conservatives" within the denomination, it is a sad testimony that they can only be happy and feel sufficiently superior only when they are condemning others and trampling on the religious freedom of others.