Not Quite As Liberal As They Look

Readers of newspaper "Vows" columns, which have lately blossomed to include gay and lesbian ceremonies, may think that although the Catholic and evangelical churches regard same-sex wedlock as ungodly, somebody must be churning out gay marriages wholesale. In fact, no major church offers a ritual for full-fledged gay marriage. True, the old liberal Protestant mainline churches have over decades bestowed on thousands of couples alternative sanctions called union ceremonies or same-sex blessings. But even these are ferociously debated. Controversy over them — along with a new argument about whether to enter the national fight over marriage in its civil form — may soon rival the gay-ordination issue as liberal Protestantism's worst headache.

Mainline churches are sometimes more liberal regarding society at large than they are about themselves. Last November, for instance, Bishop Susan Hassinger, the top United Methodist Church official in New England, sent out a pastoral letter about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's initial ruling allowing gay civil marriages. She made two points. One was that the Methodists' Social Principles explicitly promote "basic human rights and civil liberties ... for homosexual persons" and so should "imply support" for the civil decision. The other was that since the Principles define marriage within the church as being between a man and a woman, "at this point in our denomination's common life, the covenant of marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples."

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Many fellow Methodists may not even concede her first assertion. Among mainline churches, theirs have proved the least tolerant of any sort of gay commitment. Four years ago at a bitter denominational meeting, delegates emphatically sustained a ban on gay union ceremonies by Methodist ministers, one of whom had been defrocked when he went ahead anyway. At the Methodists' next conference in April, emboldened conservatives hope to pass some statement that not just Methodist marriages but all marriages should be hetero-only. "It's a timely, front-burner issue," says James Heidinger, publisher of the traditionalist magazine Good News.

In June the precise opposite may occur at the convention of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Unlike the Methodists, the Presbyterians upheld holy-union ceremonies back in 2001, and this June the denomination's pro-gay-rights faction will press for a liberal stance regarding the world at large.

The meetings of both churches will be heated, yet the combative mood may be tempered by the recent history of the Episcopal Church USA, where the gay-blessings fracas proved costly. The rites were commonly practiced in the church, and Episcopal bishops voted last August to designate communities that celebrate them as "within the bounds of our common life." That approval, along with the enthronement of openly gay bishop Gene Robinson, sparked a movement by conservatives to disassociate their dioceses from the main church leadership, which may result in something like a schism. If they can, the other mainline denominations will try to avoid letting things go quite that far.