John J Anderson. Journal of Religious Ethics. Volume 41, Issue 4. December 2013.
When in 1984, the United Methodist Church (UMC) passed a resolution prohibiting “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from serving as ordained ministers (United Methodist Publishing House 2008, ¶ 304.3), opponents immediately challenged the policy. Citing another UMC policy that prohibits discrimination based on race or status (2008, ¶ 16.1 and ¶ 16.14), opponents of the new ordination standard argued that it violated the anti-discrimination policy by discriminating against gays and lesbians on the basis of their status as homosexuals. In light of this concern, the Judicial Council, the highest court of the UMC, ruled that prohibiting “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from ordained ministry was constitutional. The Council did not, however, try to deny that homosexuality should be protected as a status. Instead, it stated that status was not the issue. One member of the Council, James M. Dolliver, noted in a concurring opinion that “while, arguably, to be a homosexual is to be within a protected status… [the UMC] does not per se bar homosexuals from ordained ministry.” Rather, the prohibition “is directed toward those persons who are ‘self-avowed practicing homosexuals,’ which is an entirely different thing” (The United Methodist Church Judicial Council 1984). In other words, since a homosexual (albeit a non-practicing homosexual) can still be ordained, the standard cannot be said to discriminate against homosexuals as a group. The ordination standard addresses conduct, not sexual orientation.
Dolliver demarcates homosexual identity from homosexual conduct in order to regulate homosexual expression without condemning homosexuals as persons—or at least that is his claim. This type of argument has been repeated many times in mainline Protestant debates about homosexuality over the past four decades, as churches have sought to prohibit homosexual practice while affirming the inherent dignity of homosexuals as persons. On the face of it, this balancing act emphasizes actions over sexual orientation, and proponents of the prohibition of homosexual practice believe such an emphasis reflects the Bible’s references to same-sex sexual activity.
I argue that the rhetoric of homosexual practice is directed at identity as well as practice because of the way it participates in constructing and perpetuating an oppressive view of homosexuality. It does so by functioning in a contradictory fashion. On the one hand, proponents use the language of homosexual practice to separate homosexual conduct from homosexual identity or status. But, on the other hand, the language of homosexual practice operates by doing the exact opposite—it conflates homosexual conduct and identity. Homosexuality as an identity is so closely associated with prohibited homosexual practice in public debate and disciplinary procedures that the distinction between the “practicing” and the “non-practicing homosexual” is nugatory. Being a homosexual is enough to implicate one in the category of the prohibited. Thus, the claim that the prohibition of homosexual practice does not discriminate against gays and lesbians as a group is, at best, disingenuous.
For gays and lesbians who are forced to negotiate these policies, sexual conduct and identity relate to one another in a complex and oppressive way. I analyze the language of homosexual practice in the context of this relationship, focusing on the policies of two mainline Protestant denominations, the UMC and Presbyterian Church (USA). The UMC continues to prohibit “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from ordained ministry, while the PC(USA) overturned its ban in 2011. In both denominations, these policies are/were adjudicated in church court systems that serve to mete out discipline as well as to interpret the governing documents of each church. The decisions of these church courts reflect the difficulties of defining and enforcing a prohibition of homosexual practice among clergy and ordination candidates. These texts reveal that the rhetoric of homosexual practice fails to shift focus from sexual identity to sexual actions. The real differentiation embodied by this rhetoric is not that of the practicing and the non-practicing homosexual, but of the heterosexual and the non-heterosexual.
While I focus on the UMC and PC(USA) to show the prejudicial nature of these policies, this rhetoric is prevalent in other denominations as well. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), for example, instituted a ban on the ordination of practicing gays and lesbians soon after its formation in 1988; that ban was overturned in 2009. Christian B. Scharen demonstrates how the ELCA policy was used to produce candidates for ordination who had internalized its heteronormative standards (2000, 95). And many other Christian churches still hold similar policies that condemn homosexual practice while also trying to respect gays and lesbians as persons. The UMC and PC(USA), therefore, are not isolated instances of the rhetoric of homosexual practice, but case studies that reveal the failure of the logic at work in ordination bans, regardless of denomination.
Furthermore, there are numerous parallels in secular law and political debate. The record of enforcement of sodomy laws in the United States provides striking examples of how merely identifying as a homosexual can lead to arrest and prosecution. While the U.S. Supreme Court struck down these laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), it is nevertheless worth noting that earlier Supreme Court cases were often argued on the basis of similar logic to the policies analyzed in this essay. In the most significant of these decisions, Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), Michael Hardwick was arrested on sodomy charges after a police officer entered his residence and found him engaging in oral sex with another man. Prior to that arrest, however, the same police officer had ticketed Hardwick for drinking in public outside a gay bar. During this initial encounter with the officer, Hardwick explained his action (he was throwing a beer bottle in a trashcan) by telling the officer he was a bartender at the bar, which identified Hardwick as a gay man. These details are not insignificant, and legal scholars have remarked that the arrest of Hardwick on sodomy charges had as much to do with his identification as a homosexual as it did with the act Hardwick was engaged in at the time of his arrest. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini rightly note that in the logic of Hardwick, “homosexual identity itself seemed to become an actionable form of homosexual practice” (2004, 36).
Jakobsen and Pellegrini analyze another Supreme Court decision that further illustrates the tenuous nature of “homosexual practice” as a legal category. Romer v. Evans (1996) struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that overturned all state and local anti-discrimination ordinances protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination based on sexual orientation. While this case is typically described as a victory for gay rights, Justice Antonin Scalia’s minority opinion broadens the rationale of the earlier Hardwick case in troubling ways. The Supreme Court had argued in Hardwick that homosexual conduct is not protected constitutionally. Scalia, in his Romer opinion, casts gay and lesbian political speech as a form of homosexual conduct. Jakobsen and Pellegrini describe his dissenting opinion as a “rhetorical bait and switch”: by invoking the category “homosexual conduct” and applying it to Romer, which dealt with homosexuality as a public identity, he enveloped a wide constellation of activities and speech into what the Court had previously interpreted to be a narrow category of sex acts (2004, 38). Clearly, for Scalia, homosexual conduct is defined primarily by the sexual identity of the person rather than by any specific action. These court cases show that the language at the heart of the UMC and PC(USA) ordination policies resonates far beyond these two denominations. Thus, an analysis of the logic of these policies will shed light on broader debates about homosexuality. As we interrogate the decisions that adjudicate the ban on practicing homosexuals from ordination, it is vital to ask what underlies these policies and what effects they have on gays and lesbians in the church.
To better understand the policies of these two denominations, we must examine the historical context and theological footing of the rhetoric of homosexual practice. German theologian Helmut Thielicke was one of the earliest proponents of the notion that homosexual identity and conduct should be evaluated separately. He provided a theological precedent for the rhetoric of homosexual practice, and, as I shall argue, this precedent is based in a heterosexist theological anthropology. Connecting this theological foundation with the actual consequences of the policies that prohibit homosexual practice reveals the prejudicial moorings of the policies, as well as the depth of the problem.
The Emergence of the Rhetoric of Homosexual Practice in Christian Theology and Ethics
The rhetoric of homosexual practice is a relatively recent invention in Christian thought, though it certainly has its predecessors in the recent and distant past. The expression did not become a fixture in Protestant parlance in the United States until the 1970s. But earlier, several individuals discussed homosexuality in ways that both suggested a division between homosexual behavior and homosexual identity and indicated the importance of evaluating the two separately. Sherwin Bailey, a British scholar who wrote extensively about Christianity and homosexuality, suggested that homosexuality as a condition and homosexual behavior must be understood as two distinct phenomena. Unlike most other Christian scholars writing about homosexuality, he reached this conclusion after substantially engaging the literature in psychiatry and sexology Bailey’s view is fully evident in his entry on “Homosexuality and Homosexualism” for the 1967 edition of A Dictionary of Christian Ethics.
Homosexuality is a personal condition, not a kind of behaviour (for which the term homosexualism is used here) … Homosexuality generally disposes the subject to self-expression in physical acts with others of the same sex, and when moral or social restraints are weak or absent there may be occasional or habitual indulgence in some kind of homosexualism. (Bailey 1967, 152)
That Bailey took such care to distinguish homosexuality as a condition from homosexual behavior is indicative of the degree to which the two were associated in theology, as well as in society in general.
The first serious theological treatment of homosexuality that employed this division was Thielicke’s The Ethics of Sex, the final book in his three-volume opus on theological ethics. Thielicke offered an in-depth discussion of sexuality around the time that many denominations were beginning to debate and draft policies about sexuality and homosexuality, and it received much attention from scholars and pastors alike. Thielicke’s analysis of homosexuality provided the theological basis for theologians and church leaders to draft policies that sought to protect the dignity of homosexual persons while also categorically prohibiting homosexual behavior. He did this by dividing his treatment of homosexuality into two parts, a theological evaluation of the person and a moral evaluation of actions.
Thielicke criticized theologians like Karl Barth for making the statement that “homosexuality is sinful.” He claimed that their error is to project their own anti-homosexual prejudices onto their assessment of homosexuality, and this leads to evaluating homosexuality the same way one evaluates homosexual conduct. Thielicke argued that rather than rejecting homosexuality outright, the Christian theologian and ethicist must take seriously the notion that homosexuality can be or is a constitutional predisposition. On the basis of that premise, Thielicke asked two questions that were unique for his time and vocation: “What is the person who is so constituted by ‘fate’ to think of himself from the theological point of view? This is after all the real question. And then how shall he act on the basis of this self-understanding?” (Thielicke 1964, 272). Thielicke’s answer to the first question was that the homosexual need not think of himself as more sinful or corrupt than anyone else, because homosexuality is a predisposed condition for which the homosexual is not culpable. Thus, he made the analogy that just as original sin is to be distinguished from the actualization of a concrete sin, so is the homosexual predisposition to be distinguished from homosexual acts (1964, 282–83).
Thielicke’s analogy is fitting for his argument because he saw the homosexual constitution as a product of the disordered state in a postlapsarian world. It is a “symptomatic participation in the fate of the fallen world,” and, Thielicke claimed that this meant that homosexuals should not be evaluated as inherently more sinful than “us ‘normal’ persons” (1964, 282–83). As he wrote:
The predisposition itself, the homosexual potentiality as such, dare not be any more strongly depreciated than the status of existence which we all share as men in the disordered creation that exists since the Fall (post lapsum) … Consequently, there is not the slightest excuse for maligning the constitutional homosexual morally or theologically. (1964, 283)
Theologically, Thielicke preferred to speak of all humanity as bearing the same fallen status, with no room for singling out one group of persons over any other. For this reason Thielicke argued that homosexuality as an existential situation was immune from the condemnation leveled against homosexual acts.
While Thielicke’s discussion of homosexuality as a predisposition is noteworthy for what some have called its “qualified acceptance” of the homosexual (Nelson 1978, 196), the heterosexist underpinnings of his theological anthropology are easy to detect. Thielicke stressed that homosexuals and heterosexuals shared the same postlapsarian existence, but by no means did this place both sexual orientations on equal footing. Theologically speaking, heterosexuality is good because it is part of the order of creation. Indeed, Thielicke’s theological sexual anthropology was based on the view that the sex differentiation referenced in the first chapters of Genesis carries normative weight, for it establishes God’s intention for man and woman to be together (1964, 4). Thus, while the expression of heterosexuality always occurs in this fallen world and is mired by sin, the heterosexual’s sexuality rests on the sure footing of God’s intention for humankind. The expression of homosexuality is also sinful, but homosexuality as a predisposition is rooted not in God’s intention, but in human sinfulness. It is a “distortion or depravation” of the created order of the sexes (1964, 283).
This theological difference cannot be underestimated, for it has an immense impact on Thielicke’s description of the homosexual and his moral evaluation of homosexual practice. Thielicke’s discussion of the theological and existential situation that homosexuals find themselves in depicts persons who have little choice in how they conduct themselves sexually. Indeed, the constitutional homosexual, beset as he is with a sexuality in discord with God’s intention for creation, is troubled by “the slippery ground of his existence” and caught in “a situation of permanent conflict” (1964, 287).
Thielicke did note that some of the conflict a homosexual faces is not inherent to her sexual constitution, but is rooted in societal discrimination and prejudice. Nevertheless, a consequence of Thielicke’s description of homosexual personhood (one which he did not seem to appreciate) is that a homosexual constitution compromises the sovereignty of the moral agent. The homosexual is not in complete control of his actions, and is defined by an inherent, dubious capacity to give in to sexual temptations and engage in homosexual practice. In other words, while Thielicke wanted to keep his judgment of homosexual behavior separate from his view of homosexuality as a condition, those two things elide in the course of his analysis. Ultimately, then, the division does not protect the homosexual person from a negative judgment.
For mainline American Protestants, Thielicke’s division between the homosexual person and homosexual behavior was useful in responding both to the medical establishment’s changing views about homosexuality and the rise of the modern gay rights movement. The visibility of the gay rights movement—especially following the 1969 Stonewall Riots—in the late 1960s led gays and lesbians to publicly reject the stigma attached to being gay. Frank Kameny, for example, coined the slogan “Gay is good” (inspired by the phrase “Black is beautiful”) in 1968 to offer an understanding of homosexuality not defined by frameworks of pathology or sin.
Not coincidentally, these political and cultural movements paralleled the shift in the official position of the medical community regarding homosexuality. The pathological definition of homosexuality had come under increasing challenge by the medical community in the 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in the decision of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973. With homosexuality no longer viewed by the medical community as a medical condition to be treated, mainline Protestant denominations had to grapple with how to balance biblical authority with the consensus of the professional community. As Heather White notes in her historical study of Christian views of homosexuality, the separation of conduct from the sexual orientation itself played a crucial role in this regard:
The distinction between homosexuality as a neutral orientation and homosexual conduct as a sinful breach of Christian teachings functioned in more complicated ways to provide Protestant churches a provisional stance amid conflicting frameworks of medical science and biblical morality … By distinguishing orientation from practice, they could continue to embrace medical frameworks that questioned homosexual pathology while also upholding doctrines of homosexual sinfulness. (White 2007, 107)
Thus, the language of homosexual practice provides a vocabulary that concedes the modern concept of homosexuality as a deeply ingrained, non-pathological aspect of personhood, but also re-affirms biblical references to homosexuality as a binding proscription of homosexual conduct.
This vocabulary became codified in the 1970s as a result of several mainline Protestant statements regarding homosexuality. These statements embodied the division of homosexual identity and conduct by, on the one hand, expressing the need to protect gays and lesbians from violence and discrimination in the church and society and asserting the basic human dignity of gays and lesbians as creatures of God; and, on the other hand, stating unequivocally that homosexual practice was against Christian teaching. Along these lines, the UMC amended its Book of Discipline in 1972 with a statement on homosexuality that affirmed homosexuals to be persons of sacred worth no less than heterosexuals, but labeled the practice of homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching. This statement was incorporated into the UMC’s ordination standards in 1984, when the General Conference adopted ¶ 304.3, banning self-avowed practicing homosexuals from ordination.
The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA)—a denomination that joined with two other Presbyterian churches in 1983 to form the PC(USA)—used Bailey’s entry from the Dictionary of Christian Ethics in its statement on human sexuality adopted in 1970, stating, “There is a difference between homosexuality as a condition of personal existence and homosexualism as explicit homosexual behavior” (The General Assembly of the UPCUSA 1970, 18). The document also relied on Thielicke’s The Ethics of Sex to articulate homosexuality as an identity. It noted that while Scripture does not single out homosexuality as more heinous than other sins, homosexuality remains indicative of “man’s refusal to accept his creatureliness” (1970, 18). This statement did not address the ordination of gays and lesbians, but the UPCUSA took up this issue in its 1978 statement “The Church and Homosexuality,” which banned “persons who do not repent of homosexual practice” from ordination. But it also made clear that homosexuals who repent of homosexual practice—either by adopting a celibate way of life or redirecting their sexual desire toward heterosexual relationships—can be ordained. What is more, a non-practicing homosexual who seeks ordination is encouraged to disclose his or her sexuality, if only for the sake of helping other gays and lesbians repent of their “practice.” “Indeed, such candidates must be welcomed and be free to share their full identity. Their experience of hatred and rejection may have given them a unique capacity for love and sensitivity as wounded healers among heterosexual Christians, and they may be incomparably equipped to extend the church’s outreach to the homosexual community” (The General Assembly of the UPCUSA 1978, 60). In 1985, two years after the PC(USA) was formed, a ruling of the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission (GAPJC), the denomination’s highest court, declared that the 1978 statement was “definitive guidance” for the church, giving it the force of law (General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbyterian Church (USA) 1985). In 1993, the General Assembly, the denomination’s highest legislative body, reinforced the GAPJC’s decision by making the 1978 statement an “Authoritative Interpretation” of the Constitution of the PC(USA). This Authoritative Interpretation set the ordination standard regarding homosexuality until the General Assembly amended the Constitution in 1997 by adopting G-60106b, a clause that prohibited persons from ordination who refused to repent from a practice—that is, homosexual practice—that the PC(USA) considered sinful.
It should be pointed out that this policy did not actually mention homosexuality by name, and many of its proponents argued that its goal was to raise behavioral standards for everyone, gay and straight alike. While this is true in a technical sense, there is no question that the controversy surrounding the ordination of gays and lesbians precipitated the adoption of this policy. The fact that homosexual practice was not named specifically was as much a strategy for getting G-60106b passed as it was a plan to raise ordination standards for all. This policy was overturned in 2011, paving the way for “practicing” gays and lesbians to be ordained.
These policies were drafted over several decades and by many different incarnations of the legislative bodies of the UMC and PC(USA). This is an important point, because it emphasizes that the language I analyze emerges from complex, often politicized, processes that involve many members of the respective denominations. The end result is oftentimes a policy that is somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation. As cases are brought forth that test the language of these policies, the role of the church courts becomes paramount.
The Enforcement of the Rhetoric of Homosexual Practice
The documents surveyed codified the position that being homosexual was protected as a status, but that acting homosexual was sinful. However, the enforcement of these policies reveals that, much like in Thielicke’s theological evaluation of homosexuality, the condemnation of homosexual practice is no different than a suspicion of homosexual personhood. The line between personhood and practice, which proponents of these ordination policies declare to be clear and justifiable, is nebulous at best. There are numerous examples of the adjudication of these policies in the UMC and PC(USA) that demonstrate how policies prohibiting homosexual practice come to define homosexuals as persons.
Decisions of the UMC Judicial Council provide examples of this conflation of identity and practice. For example, in 1971, the year prior to the UMC adopting legislation calling homosexual practice “incompatible with Christian teaching,” F. Gene Leggett, an ordained minister in the Southwest Texas Annual Conference, announced at a meeting of the Conference that he was a homosexual. The following month, “in light of this statement and its implications,” the Conference suspended Leggett’s ordination, finding him “unacceptable in the work of the ministry” (Judicial Council 1972, emphasis mine; Associated Press 1971). This action did not initially involve church courts because of the UMC’s practice of annually appointing clergy, meaning that each year an Annual Conference reaffirms (or in this case, does not) each clergyperson’s ordination credentials and assigns ministerial appointments. The Judicial Council upheld the constitutionality of Leggett’s suspension. Leggett only stated that he was a homosexual, but his colleagues were troubled by the implications of such a statement. Were they worried that he would represent himself in public as a homosexual, or that he would engage in homosexual sex? Whatever the answer, Leggett’s suspension shows how just being openly gay made one susceptible to church discipline.
Of course, Leggett’s suspension occurred before the ban on homosexual practice was established. But the introduction of this ban, allowing discipline to focus—presumably—on actions rather than status, only changed the situation slightly. Identity and practice can be separated in theory but conflated in practice because the term “practice” is ambiguous and easy to manipulate. While it is easy to assume that practice refers to sex with someone of the same gender, the term has actually proven harder to define. Since the 1984 adoption of ¶ 304.3 banning self-avowed practicing homosexuals from ordination, many decisions of the Judicial Council that address this policy either emphasize the need for the General Conference or Annual Conferences (the General Conference is the national legislative body of the UMC and Annual Conferences are regional legislative bodies) to define the phrase “self-avowed practicing homosexual” or adjudicate the definitions offered by different Annual Conferences.
Two decisions are particularly important regarding the ambiguity of the term homosexual practice. The first was a 1995 decision adopted by the California Pacific Conference that defined the phrase “self-avowed practicing homosexual.” The Conference’s definition read, in part:
A self-avowed homosexual is one who makes it known by affirming publicly that she/he engages in genital sexual behavior with a person of the same gender…. “Practicing” does not mean behavior such as friendship or persons living together as roommates, socializing or meeting with homosexuals, or speaking in support of or agreement with homosexuality. (Judicial Council 1995)
Though it does not address the basic injustice of prohibiting homosexual practice, a definition such as this might prevent ecclesial rulings that interpret “homosexual practice” so broadly as to include any public representation of one’s status as a homosexual (such as Scalia’s dissenting opinion in Romer). The Judicial Council ruled the definition was invalid, but chose not to address the portion of the definition that dealt specifically with homosexual practice. Instead, it stated that it was invalid because its definition of “self-avowal” was insufficient insofar as it did not specify to whom the avowal is to be made. The Council continued: “The failure of the definition to include such identification renders the definition invalid. For this reason, it is unnecessary to address the other questions presented” (1995, emphasis mine). One of those questions, of course, dealt directly with the definition of practice. That the Council turned down an opportunity to clarify what homosexual practice refers to is curious, since it took the initiative to give guidance concerning how to proceed in defining self-avowal. If the Council placed an importance on defining the phrase “self-avowed practicing homosexual,” as it had stated it did in previous decisions (1984 and 1993), its inaction regarding a proposed definition of homosexual practice is inexplicable.
The irony of the attention the Judicial Council has paid to properly defining the language of ¶ 304.3 is that it has also maintained that, in the absence of any precise definition or in the presence of multiple definitions, ¶ 304.3 is no less enforceable. In 2005 the California-Nevada Annual Conference passed a statement that addressed the language of homosexual practice. It read: “The California-Nevada Annual Conference hereby specifically refuses and declines to define the word ‘practicing’ or ‘practicing homosexual’” (Judicial Council 2005a). After its passage, a member of the Annual Conference submitted a query to the conference bishop asking if the item called into question the enforceability ¶ of 304.3. The bishop responded that it did not, and the Judicial Council was then asked to review the bishop’s ruling on the matter. In Decision 1020, the Judicial Council ruled, “the refusal of an annual conference to define ‘practicing’ or ‘practicing homosexual’ does not void or violate the enforceability of ¶ 304.3” (Judicial Council 2005a). This ruling would have made sense if ¶ 304.3 offered a definition of homosexual practice. If it did, there would be no reason for an Annual Conference to offer its own definition. But ¶ 304.3 does not. A footnote to ¶ 304.3 offers a definition of the entire phrase—“‘Self-avowed practicing homosexual’ is understood to mean that a person openly acknowledges to a bishop, district superintendent, district committee of ordained ministry, Board of Ordained Ministry, or clergy session that the person is a practicing homosexual”—but the definition is silent on what does and does not constitute homosexual practice. It is concerned only with specifying what constitutes self-avowal. Thus, there seems to be no official definition of the term.
Proponents of ¶ 304.3 might argue that the term “homosexual practice” refers specifically to genital contact between persons of the same gender. The Judicial Council emphasized this point in Decision 920. There, the Council stipulated that a minister who is under review for being “a self-avowed practicing homosexual” must be asked “whether she is engaged in genital sexual acts with a person of the same gender” (Judicial Council 2001). Furthermore, during the highly publicized trial of Beth Stroud in 2005, this focus on genital contact was emphasized once again (Judicial Council 2005b). While these cases confirm that the phrase “homosexual practice” includes genital sex, it does not draw clear boundaries as to what else may or may not be construed as homosexual practice. At what point does one move from the category of “nonpracticing” to “practicing”? Does going on a date with someone of the same gender or kissing someone of the same gender make one a practicing homosexual? Does fantasizing about someone of the same gender constitute homosexual practice? These questions remain unanswered.
At the very least, then, the lack of a detailed definition of homosexual practice in the UMC documents makes it unclear what is being prohibited and what is being prosecuted in disciplinary cases. An example from the Book of Discipline further demonstrates this ambiguity. With one exception, all the offenses with which ordained ministers may be charged name specific actions: sexual abuse, harassment, racial discrimination, etc. The exception concerns homosexuality. “Being a self-avowed practicing homosexual” is a chargeable offense in the UMC (2008, ¶ 2702). The wording implies that it is not a specific act, but being a specific kind of person—the kind of person who commits homosexual acts—that is a chargeable offense in the UMC, turning what is supposed to be an ordination standard focused on specific prohibited conduct into a judgment of a group of persons. In the 2005 decision of the UMC Judicial Council that resulted in the defrocking of Beth Stroud, two members of the Council offered a minority opinion that further illustrates this point. The authors, Susan T. Henry-Crowe and Beth Capen, argue that ¶ 304.3 of the Discipline establishes an a priori judgment of homosexual candidates. “Only in ¶ 304.3,” they write, “is there a prohibition which relates to prejudged ‘conduct’ prior to examination of character. Is this not categorical discrimination?” (Judicial Council 2005b).
Some might argue that I am reading too much into the language of these policies and their adjudication. But if, for some, the conflation of homosexual conduct and identity is not explicit enough in the UMC policies, consider the adjudication of the prohibition of homosexual practice in PC(USA) during the years when that policy was in effect.
Since the denomination’s formation in 1983, numerous decisions of the GAPJC, despite the court’s efforts to protect homosexuality as a status, have created circumstances that allow gay and lesbian ordinands, ministers, and church officers to be questioned and/or disciplined based on the knowledge or suspicion that they are homosexual. The cases that best illustrate this situation are remedial cases, meaning they are cases brought against an ordaining body rather than an individual. One of the first significant cases in this judicial history involves Lisa Larges. Larges became a candidate for ordination in 1986—eleven years before G-6.0106b was adopted—in the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area. In 1991, prior to the final interview with her Committee on Preparation for Ministry (CPM), she informed the CPM that she was a lesbian. The CPM conducted the interview and voted to continue with her ordination process. Later that year, the CPM recommended to the presbytery that Larges be certified as ready to receive a call, one of the last steps before ordination. The presbytery, aware that Larges had identified herself as a lesbian, certified Larges as ready to receive a call. After the vote, thirty-two members of the presbytery who voted “no” filed a complaint with the Permanent Judicial Commission (PJC) of the Synod of Lakes and Prairies—the synod to which the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area belongs—arguing that the certification of Larges was “irregular” and should be revoked. The Synod PJC ruled that the provisions of “The Church and Homosexuality” that banned “self-affirming, practicing homosexuals” from ordination applied to Larges and that, therefore, her certification was irregular and should be rescinded. The Synod PJC was aware that Larges had identified herself as a lesbian and not as a “practicing lesbian,” but it argued that it found sufficient evidence to believe her to be a “practicing homosexual,” though no such evidence was presented. Since the evidence was never produced, it seems the rationale of the Synod PJC was that her sexual orientation justified an inference about her disposition toward homosexual practice, regardless of whether or not she was currently “practicing.” One study collecting data on ordination standards asserts that the Synod PJC “made a judgment call guessing as to what Ms. Larges might do in the future, not on any activity she was doing at the time” (North Como Presbyterian Church 2005, 159).
The presbytery promptly appealed the Synod PJC’s decision to the GAPJC. In the decision, LeTourneau, et al. v. The Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area (hereafter LeTourneau), the GAPJC acknowledged that Larges never claimed to be a practicing lesbian but nevertheless upheld the Synod PJC’s decision to revoke Larges’s certification for ordination. The GAPJC was careful to point out that Larges was to remain a candidate for ordination, but her presbytery could not certify her as “ready to receive a call” until Larges had satisfactorily shown that she was not a practicing homosexual. The decision affirmed, in other words, the notion that a homosexual orientation is reason enough for a presbytery to refrain from certifying a candidate as ready to receive a call. The implied reasoning seems to be that being a homosexual grounds a reasonable suspicion that one is or will inevitably become a practicing homosexual as well. To this end, the GAPJC stated, “Sexual orientation and practice is relevant to a candidate’s qualifications for ordination and must be investigated by a presbytery’s [CPM] when, as here, the candidate has taken the initiative in declaring his or her sexual orientation” (GAPJC 1992). The 1992 GAPJC clearly viewed the declaration of homosexual identity as something that calls one’s fitness for ordination into serious question. Because she had declared herself to be a lesbian, Larges was guilty of homosexual practice until proven innocent, and her CPM had not conducted sufficient inquiries to sustain her innocence.
One direct consequence of the GAPJC’s decision in the 1992 case regarding Lisa Larges was to set a judicial precedent allowing ordination committees to question ordination candidates about their sexual orientation and, presumably, their sexual history. Coming out to one’s denomination not only could but should entail an investigation of orientation and practice, according to the 1992 GAPJC. From the time of the LeTourneau decision to the overturning of the PC(USA)’s anti-gay ordination policy in 2011, this imperative to question gay and lesbian candidates about their sexualities was upheld by the GAPJC in numerous cases, though the specific circumstances under which an investigation becomes warranted changed from case to case.
A key decision in this history is the 2002 case Ronald L. Wier v. Session, Second Presbyterian Church of Ft. Lauderdale (hereafter Wier). In this decision, which involved the ordination of a church member to the office of deacon or elder (the decision does not specify which), the GAPJC upheld the responsibility of an ordaining body to question candidates for church office regarding homosexuality, and the way it did so highlights the convoluted nature of the identity/conduct distinction. On the one hand, the GAPJC seemingly offered protection to gay and lesbian candidates from unwarranted, invasive questions by ordaining bodies. It emphasized that the ordination standard in G-6.0106b stipulates that only those who refuse to repent from “self-acknowledged practice” are disqualified from ordination and church office, and that such self-acknowledgment must be “plain, palpable, and obvious” before any special inquiry is warranted (GAPJC 2002). The GAPJC stressed this point to prevent a recurrence of what happened in the LeTourneau case from 1992, where Lisa Larges was charged based on the suspicion that she would engage in homosexual practice at some point in the future. To file charges against someone under these circumstances, the GAPJC argued in Wier, is “to single out a category of persons above and beyond other persons as more likely to sin” (GAPJC 2002). By making this statement, the GAPJC was essentially making the case against conflating sexual orientation and practice, something that had not been done before in the PC(USA).
On the other hand, the GAPJC then provided justification, as in the 1992 case, for questioning a candidate concerning his or her sexual orientation and potential practice.
Since the ordaining and installing governing body best knows the life and character of the candidate, initial and further inquiry as to compliance with all the standards for ordination and installation belongs to that governing body. If that governing body has reasonable cause for inquiry based on its knowledge of the life and character of the candidate, it has the positive obligation to make due inquiry and uphold all the standards for ordination and installation. Consideration for inquiry is to be made solely on an individual basis … Therefore, if notwithstanding the requirement of individualized inquiry based on reasonable cause, a governing body makes a line of inquiry to a candidate without reasonable cause, all candidates currently before that governing body must undergo the same inquiry. (GAPJC 2002, emphasis mine)
The language in this statement shows that, despite providing a strong definition for what constitutes self-acknowledgement, the GAPJC did not clarify how an ordaining body might go about getting a candidate to acknowledge homosexual practice. If an ordaining body has reason to suspect someone of homosexual practice, then making inquiries of that individual is the ordaining body’s positive obligation. If the ordaining body did not have reasonable cause, questions could still be asked, but must be asked of everyone being considered for ordination to avoid singling out, in the GAPJC’s own words, “a category of persons above and beyond other persons as more likely to sin” (2002).
It is easy to see how these guidelines can be abused. If an ordaining body, for example, is considering three persons for ordination, and one of them is known or thought to be a homosexual, then they might just ask specific questions of all three candidates to avoid the appearance of discrimination. Whether or not this was the intention of the GAPJC, some have interpreted it this way (Vermaak 2009, 308). And despite the fact that the GAPJC spoke against investigating someone simply because of his or her sexual orientation, the ruling construed the guidelines so broadly that the possibility for such an inquiry was still very much alive.
A decision the following year scaled back the latitude that the GAPJC granted ordaining bodies in Wier to question candidates about homosexual practice—with or without reasonable cause. In Presbytery of San Joaquin v. Presbytery of the Redwoods (hereafter San Joaquin), the GAPJC first affirmed the comments in Wier that sexual orientation could not by itself prohibit someone from ordination. It then made clear that ordaining bodies must have reasonable grounds to conduct special investigations of candidates, and the reasonable grounds “must include factual allegations of how, when, where, and under what circumstances the individual was self-acknowledging a practice which the confessions call a sin” (GAPJC 2003b). Wier had stated something very similar, but the loophole it opened—that ordaining bodies could investigate candidates about homosexual practice without reasonable cause as long as they asked questions of all candidates—was effectively closed by the GAPJC in 2003.
That is, the loophole was closed from 2003 to 2006, when the GAPJC issued another decision that seemingly overturned portions of San Joaquin. The circumstances of the 2006 GAPJC decision, Colonial Presbyterian Church v. Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, began in 2004 with the election of church officers at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church (hereafter, Grace Covenant). Between the election and installation of said officers, members of the Committee on Ministry (COM) of Heartland Presbytery, to which Grace Covenant belonged, expressed concern over one officer-elect who was “thought to be a lesbian” (GAPJC 2006). The COM met with representatives from Grace Covenant to discuss the officers elected but did not report any concerns about them. The ordination and installation of officers took place at Grace Covenant several weeks after the meeting.
Several months later, the session of Colonial Presbyterian Church (hereafter, Colonial), another church in the presbytery, requested from the session of Grace Covenant that the church address an alleged delinquency in the ordination of one or more of its elders. Grace Covenant did not comply, at which time the session of Colonial submitted a complaint to Heartland Presbytery that the election, ordination, and installation of an elder at Grace Covenant was irregular and delinquent. The PJC of Heartland Presbytery dismissed the case without holding a trial, arguing that the complainant did not state a claim upon which relief could be granted. In short, because there was not a claim that homosexual practice had occurred—as stated earlier, the case was initiated because one elected officer was thought to be a lesbian, not a practicing lesbian—there was no cause to question whether the election, ordination, and installation of the elder was constitutional. Colonial challenged that ruling, appealing to the PJC of the Synod of Mid-America. The Synod PJC upheld the ruling of the Presbytery PJC, and used the precedent from San Joaquin to argue its case, citing that decision’s assertions that sexual orientation was not sufficient grounds for a special investigation of ordination candidates and that factual allegations of the self-acknowledgement of homosexual practice was necessary if an investigation was to be made. Colonial appeared to be acting on the belief that one elected elder was a lesbian and did not provide any evidence that said elder had self-acknowledged homosexual practice.
Colonial, however, appealed to the GAPJC. The GAPJC overturned the decisions of the Synod and Presbytery PJCs, applying the Wier ruling to argue that Grace Covenant knew enough of the “life and character of the candidate” to inquire of the candidate in question whether she was willing to comply with the ordination standard in G-6.0106b. To be clear, the GAPJC ruling was very narrow in scope; it suggested that, based on an earlier decision (GAPJC 2003a) that stated the alleged facts of a complaint must be assumed true when a PJC is deciding on whether the complaint has enough merit to warrant a trial, the lower court rulings were wrong to dismiss the case without holding a trial. It ordered that Heartland Presbytery PJC look into the examining practices of Grace Covenant and, if necessary, convene a trial.
In issuing this ruling, the GAPJC did not seem to consider the fact that the complaint did not suggest that homosexual practice was selfacknowledged by the elected elder (Vermaak 2009, 356). Furthermore, Wier and San Joaquin stated that the ordaining body was in the best position to decide if a candidate needed to be questioned to determine his or her readiness for ordination. Grace Covenant did not see the need to examine the elder-elect on her fitness for ordination regarding G-6.0106b, yet, the GAPJC basically ruled that Colonial should have been able to initiate a trial, even without producing any evidence to suggest that Grace Covenant had reasonable grounds to investigate the elder in question.
These rulings in the PC(USA) judicial system show that the official distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual practice often has little practical consequence. Prior to the 1996 passage of G-6.0106b, the conflation of homosexual orientation and homosexual practice had been made explicit in the LeTourneau decision, which prevented Lisa Larges from being declared ready to receive a call simply because she is a lesbian. During the period when G-6.0106b was in force, the association between being a homosexual and practicing one’s homosexuality became more tacit. GAPJC decisions tried to stress that sexual orientation was not a bar to various ordainable offices in the church, but it also gave committees that supervise and approve candidates for ordination leeway to investigate candidates who were gay. The investigations are clearly meant to determine if the candidate in question is a practicing homosexual and, thus, ineligible to hold a church office. But the lack of clarity in terms of when such an investigation is appropriate created an environment where any gay or lesbian candidate for ordination was treated as a potential practicing homosexual. While candidates may have a good feel for whether someone overseeing their ordination processes will insist on conducting such an inquiry into their personal lives, the surfeit of church court cases dealing with this very question—not all of which have been discussed here—prove that there was a legitimate cause for concern for any gay or lesbian candidate for ordination or church office. After all, many of the cases were initiated by persons who were not a part of the ordination process and who were simply concerned that an ordained officer in the church was in violation of G-6.0106b. Thus, in a denomination that expressly prohibited practicing homosexuals from being ordained and provided the opportunity for a gay candidate to be questioned about whether he or she was practicing, there was little or no respite for gays and lesbians from the suspicions implicit in the policy and its judicial enforcement. Gays and lesbians who were ordained or who were candidates for ordination were always at risk of having their sexual subjectivity brought under ecclesial adjudication. In short, the neat division between “homosexual” and “practicing homosexual” was meaningless.
In both the UMC and PC(USA), the enforcement of ordination bans on practicing homosexuals has revealed in different ways the difficulty of protecting the status of being a homosexual while also categorically prohibiting homosexual practice. The unstable meaning of the phrase itself and the willingness of church courts to allow inquiries into the sexual behaviors and histories of gay and lesbian candidates for ordination show that, despite the stated intentions of the authors and defenders of these policies, the effects of the prohibition of homosexual practice discriminate against gays and lesbians as a group and discourage gays and lesbians from pursuing positions of leadership when such policies are in place. In short, the rhetoric of homosexual practice addresses much more than “practice”—it is a judgment against gay and lesbian personhood.
Sexual Identity, Sexual Expression, and the Rhetoric of Homosexual Practice
The rejoinder to my argument will no doubt be to point to the fact that few ordination candidates have been denied ordination based on their status alone, and that those gay and lesbian clergy and ordinands who have been subjected to discipline are those that came out as “practicing.” Such a line of reasoning has given these policies staying power over the past four decades, but the ban on homosexual practice does not simply isolate a set of actions deemed sinful. Because these policies link specific actions to sexual identity—that is, the actions’ moral value is connected to the sexual identity of the persons performing them—it is difficult to enact a clear-cut division between sexual conduct and sexual identity. If homosexual identity is a key component in the moral evaluation of sexual conduct, then is homosexual identity genuinely protected as a status? Is a “non-practicing” homosexual, even if he or she manages to become ordained, truly equal under these policies?
Furthermore, to say that banning practicing homosexuals from ordination is different from a ban on homosexuals in general seems predicated on the notion that there is a tidy division between the sexual self and sexual expression, and that categorically denying the latter somehow does not do harm to the former. Such a claim is only tenable in the abstract, and then only for those who have never lived within or tried to view reality from the sexual margins. Michael Hartwig has argued forcefully that imposed life-long sexual abstinence is both immoral and harmful, insofar as it “undermines the development of our capacity to love with greater depth and intimacy” (Hartwig 2000, 3), and this seems especially true in the case of a categorical ban on homosexual practice because it imposes life-long abstinence on one particular group. Whatever the intentions of the proponents of these policies—whether they seek a middle path in an effort to hold struggling denominations together, or whether they seek to enforce a morality driven by biblical literalism in as politically correct a way as possible—the effect of these policies is to create a hostile environment for gays and lesbians in the church. This environment amounts to what Jakobsen and Pellegrini have referred to as “coercive homogeneity” (2004, 149).
After all, if a homosexual’s sexual identity is protected as an integral aspect of her identity as a whole, and if that identity is then defined by a practice labeled sinful and incompatible with Christian teaching, then a homosexual’s subjectivity is so defined by sin that the abundant life that Christ offers seems like a tantalizing fantasy to gays and lesbians. Scott Anderson, a minister in the PC(USA) who for years struggled to serve his denomination in the face of discrimination and recently became one of the first “practicing” gay persons to be ordained, noted in his official objection to G-6.0106b that the categorical prohibition of homosexual practice has such an effect.
The message it sends to gay and lesbian believers everywhere is that no matter how hard we might work and strive to conform our lives to the shape of the Gospel, we are disqualified on the basis of unchosen aspects of who we are from ever being able to respond to the call of God. This comes dangerously close, I believe, to telling gay and lesbian believers that Jesus Christ has nothing to offer people like me. (S. Anderson 2010)
The prohibition of homosexual practice, to Anderson, gives the Gospel a distinctly heterosexual form. The reflections of one minister who was ousted from the UMC, Rose Mary Denman, express something similar. She writes that she assumed she was heterosexual for so long “because to stand in relationship to God and the Church was seen as synonymous with being heterosexual” (Denman 1990, 182).
The prohibition of homosexual practice sends a clear message that the church is a space for heterosexuals, whether real or pseudonymous, and the reality of being gay or lesbian is denied validity. Consider the words of Lisa Larges in her objection to G-6.0106b. She writes:
[G-6.0106b] denies the dignity and lived experience of same-gender loving people … It removes sex from the context of intimacy and covenantal relationship and denies the fullness and richness of committed loving relationships between persons of the same gender … It denies the full humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons by focusing solely and exclusively on one part of their lives. (Larges 2007)
Larges distills into a few short sentences what is truly at stake—the full humanity of gays and lesbians. If church policy treats the sexuality of gays and lesbians as the defining trait of their personhood only to deny them the lived experience of their sexuality, are homosexuals fully human in the eyes of those who espouse these policies? This question is not hyperbolic. If the theological anthropology that underlies the rhetoric of homosexual practice is heterosexist, then those who do not identify as heterosexual do not have an equal place within it. And this is what convolutes the distinction between homosexual identity and homosexual practice. Those who support ordination bans on practicing homosexuals speak clearly about their views of homosexual behavior, but too often either equivocate when it comes to evaluating homosexual identity or say it is not the issue. Such equivocation is simply not acceptable. They must be clear about how they define homosexual identity and how they evaluate it morally.
The irony of my argument is that the conflation of conduct and identity is not in and of itself a bad thing. Sexual identities (and identities in general) must be connected to the daily realities of our lives, to how we choose to express ourselves as sexual beings. The ban on homosexual practice denies gays and lesbians this possibility, which is why it is so disingenuous to suggest that categorically banning homosexual practice does not discriminate against all homosexuals. To move beyond this situation, these policies must be overturned. But, in the mainline Protestant denominations that have recently taken this step—namely, the PC(USA) and the ELCA—the reticence to sanction same-gender marriages shows that full equality for those who do not identify as heterosexual requires more than a policy change. Theologically, our vision of what it means to be human must be severed from heteronormative definitions of sex and gender. Such a theological anthropology would free us to evaluate the morality of sexual expression by how it contributes to the abundant life to which Christ calls us. Perhaps most challenging, though, is communicating these theological and ethical revisions to denominational bodies and congregations in a way that moves the church toward a place that is affirming for all persons regardless of sexual identity.