Presbyterians censure retired pastor for marrying same-sex couples

Washington last week became the seventh state, along with the District of Columbia, to sanction same-sex marriage. And the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a lower-court ruling that declared California’s voter-approved gay marriage ban unconstitutional; backers of Proposition 8 are appealing that decision.

“The fundamental issue, I think, for conservative Presbyterians is that all of these issues are falling on the side of disregarding what the Scripture says” and driving churches out of the denomination, said the Rev. Mary Holder Naegeli of the Presbyterian Coalition, a national organization of evangelical conservative Presbyterians. “This particular case is important.”

Naegeli said she was glad the church high court had done the “right thing” in affirming Spahr’s guilt. But, she said, opinions attached to the ruling included arguments about why the denomination’s law on marriage should be changed.

“That’s disappointing to me,” Naegeli said.

The Rev. Jim Rigby, pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, and a liberal activist, said that in ruling on Spahr, “the church is voting on itself. For a reformed church to choose its past over its people is death.”

Rigby, who attended a packed judicial hearing in San Antonio on Friday in support of Spahr, said he was not surprised at the ruling. But “it still has this dull pain to it,” he said. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ and how Christ commanded us to look at one another.”

Spahr was found guilty in August 2010 of marrying couples after California’s Supreme Court ruled that gays and lesbians could legally wed and before voters passed Proposition 8.

At the same time it found Spahr guilty, however, the panel of church leaders from the Presbytery of the Redwoods praised Spahr for her “faithful compassion” and decades-long ministry to gays and lesbians — and underscored the confusion in the church’s constitution.

Spahr challenged that ruling, but a regional church appeals court in March affirmed her guilt. So she appealed that decision to the denomination’s national level.

Spahr’s 2010 trial in Napa, Calif., was long and emotional. Many of the couples she had married testified about how healing the legal and religious ceremony had been after a lifetime of feeling like second-class citizens.

In contrast, Friday’s hearing in a Texas hotel ballroom lasted about 90 minutes. Each side had half an hour to make its case, and then the commission members asked questions.

Spahr’s lawyer Sara Taylor — who was among those the pastor had wed — talked about the meaning of marriage. She argued that when Spahr conducted the ceremonies, it had been defensible under church law as within her discretion as a pastor.

As she listed the benefits of marriage to the couples Spahr had wed, several couples in the audience stood. That was what Spahr said she wanted most: for the commission to know the “church folk” they were dealing with, to hear their names and see their faces.

Spahr’s attorneys said that nowhere in church laws is same-sex marriage prohibited and that it was time for the church to take a stand, in the name of social justice.

Church Prosecutor JoAn Blackstone disagreed.

“We have to ask ourselves whether the denomination is ready for a change,” she said. “We haven’t gotten there yet.”

She said the decision should be made legislatively by the Presbyterian General Assembly, not the commissioners.

“If you were to redefine marriage, I think that would be a difficult thing for the church to come to terms with,” she said, urging commissioners to “consider the whole church.”

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(La Ganga reported from San Francisco and Hennessy-Fiske from San Antonio, Texas.)