Word: gays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Francis Lutheran Church voted 46 to 5 to call a lesbian couple as assistant pastors: Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart, both graduates of Luther Northwestern seminary in Minnesota. Bishop Lyle Miller refuses to approve them as ministers because they will not commit themselves to sexual abstinence. The congregation, half gay, will have to ordain the women on its own, defying both the ordination rules of the 5.3 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its policy against "homosexual erotic activity" among ministers...
...million-member United Methodist Church, ecclesiastical legislatures have wrestled with several cases involving gay clergy. Though some national church agencies have advocated toleration of gay clergy, grass- roots conservatives have fended off any such policy change. The latest round of the 17-year battle involves a committee that is re-examining the church's approach to homosexuality. The Presbyterian Church too is restudying sexuality, raising the prospect that its stand against gay behavior could be changed...
Some Protestant denominations have landed on the liberationist side. The Unitarian Universalists openly welcome gay clergy. The United Church of Christ, which in 1972 became the first major denomination to ordain an avowedly homosexual clergyman, subsequently stated that homosexual orientation is no barrier to ordination, leaving open the matter of ministers' active sexual behavior. The United Church of Canada is in an uproar over a similar policy issued last year...
Just how common is homosexuality among the Catholic clergy? A September Washington Post article cited the figures of a Baltimore therapist, A.W. Richard Sipe, who, after 25 years of interviewing 1,000 priests, concluded that 20% of the nation's Catholic clergy are gay, half of those sexually active. Sipe also estimates that 4% of priests are sexually attracted to adolescents and an additional 2% to children under 13. Responding last month, David Brinkmoeller, director of the U.S. bishops' secretariat on priestly life, questioned the validity of the figures...
...anthology, Homosexuality in the Priesthood and the Religious Life (Crossroad; $14.95), Salvatorian priest Robert Nugent, who has worked among gay Catholics for twelve years, says estimates on the numbers of homosexual clergy range from "the most conservative 10% to a more reasonable 20%" or higher. He notes that a national survey by vocation directors in men's religious orders showed that, from 1981 to 1985, 5% of candidates accepted for the priesthood identified themselves to the church as being homosexual in orientation...