Lutheran panel fails to set policy on gays

Lutheran panel fails to set policy on gays

Los Angeles Times

A task force drafting a long-awaited statement on sexuality for the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination has recommended that the church continue to define marriage as a union between a woman and a man.

The panel, in a preliminary report released Thursday, said the church, despite years of study, had yet to reach consensus on same-sex unions, but it did not condemn them.

It also expressed regret that historic Lutheran teachings on homosexuality had sometimes been used to hurt gays and lesbians.

The 50-page report, prepared for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, also noted that the church “did not favor” unmarried couples living together but acknowledged what it called the contemporary social forces behind such arrangements.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church, with 4.8 million members, is among several mainline Protestant churches struggling to reconcile differing views of homosexuality and the Bible’s teachings.

Next year, the task force is expected to decide whether to recommend changes to current church policy that bars noncelibate gays and lesbians from the clergy.

Called a “Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality,” the report is intended to guide church members in setting policy and forming judgments about social issues, officials said. After revisions, it will be presented for a vote at the church’s next biennial assembly in 2009.

A wide-ranging survey of human sexuality, the statement often celebrates what it calls “this complicated dimension of ourselves,” with all its delights and challenges.

“Sexuality can be wondrous and wounding, delightful and destructive, satisfying and confusing . . . sometimes at the same time,” it said.

But the document emphasizes that sexual intimacy should be reserved for married couples, and it condemns promiscuity, sexual exploitation and the abuse of children.