Dear editor,

I appreciate Mr. Koster's comments. However, he is very, very wrong in one of his statements. He states:

"The shame is that so far the provision has been used to filter out only self-affirmed practicing homosexual persons."

This is flat out untrue. As I have stated on this forum before, I have seen several times where it has been used in either preventing an ordination or requiring the retirement of an Elder, and none of them involved unrepentant practicing homosexuals. They all involved heterosexuals involved in co-habitation (of various sorts) or an addictive behavior with refusal to admit a problem or undergo therapy. In my own candidacy, I was required to undergo therapy for a food addiction, or lose my candidacy (That didn't bother me so much as that I had to pay for all three years totally out of my own pocket, and I had already lost 60% of the family income when I left my job to enter seminary).

The difference is, when it happens to others, no pastors or churches stand up and say "You can't do this... it is not a sin... we need to bless this behavior as long as it involves consenting adults... God created us this way, and it is a sin not to behave according to it...." There is no need to file charges with others, because there is no argument about its appropriateness in application.

Only the homosexual lobby has been so persistent, so obstinate, and so publicized. Only the homosexual lobby within the church has managed to get whole sessions and churches to push it to defiance of the Constitution. In other cases, the individuals involved accede to the decisions of the higher authority embodied at each level of government and the provisions of the Book of Order.

G6.0106b is a good provision, and is applied much more uniformly than some people would like us to believe. It certainly does NOT single out SAPHs; they just cause the greatest difficulties.

In Christ,