Church courts to take action against ministers who perform same-sex marriages
IRVING, Texas (AP) - Pastors who perform same-sex marriages can be brought before church courts and charged with disobedience, the United Methodist Church's highest court ruled today.
The court announced the church rule against same-sex marriages is a law, not a guideline.
Pastors could be reprimanded or defrocked under the law, which takes effect immediately.
The council's decision affects one sentence in the Social Principles. It reads: "Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches."
That statement was added by the 1996 General Conference, the denomination's top policiy-making body. The council decided the conference delegates "were enacting legislation that would be binding as the law of the church."
The same-sex marriage issue was the most controversial issue in the church's 25-year history with gay-rights issues. The crisis has split the 8.5 million-member denomination.
Judicial council members usually do not comment on their decisions.
Bishop Bruce Blake of Oklahoma, one of two bishops who testified at the beginning of a two-day hearing here, told The Dallas Morning News: "This is a real affirmation by the denomination. The process worked again."
The Rev. Jimmy Creech, the Nebraska pastor at the center of the controversy, disagreed and remained defiant.
"The decision validates an institutional form of bigotry," he told The News. "I will not be bound by it."
Creech, former pastor of the 1,900-member First United Methodist Church of Omaha, performed a holy union ceremony last September for a lesbian couple in defiance of his bishop and United Methodist rules.
He was acquitted six months later by a church jury that came within a single vote of convicting him of violating church law.
The acquittal prompted the regional bishops to appeal to the judicial council for a formal ruling.
Creech, who now lives in Ocracoke Island, N.C., and makes his living cleaning cottages, cannot be tried again.
The council members deliberated behind closed doors for two days in this Dallas suburb after listening to opening arguments Friday.
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