Gay Couple Denied Communion

Leah Vader and Lynne Huskinson, a lesbian couple who got married in Canada in August, sent a letter recently to their state legislator decrying a Wyoming bill that would deny recognition of same-sex marriages. The lawmaker read the letter on the floor of the Legislature.

Soon after, the local paper interviewed the couple on Ash Wednesday and ran a story and pictures of them with ash on their foreheads, a mark of their Christian faith.

It wasn’t long after that that the couple received a notice from their parish church telling them they have been barred from receiving Communion.

“If all this stuff hadn’t hit the newspaper, it wouldn’t have been any different than before -- nobody would have known about it,” said the couple’s parish priest at St. Matthew’s, the Rev. Cliff Jacobson. “The sin is one thing. It’s a very different thing to go public with that sin.” (source)

Does this mean that a private citizen can not have a personal opinion about a social issue without being punished by their church? I could see this action taking place if they made a public announcement of their relationship in church. But that is not what happened. They simply wrote a letter to their legislator stating their concerns and their opinion. It became public after that legislator read their letter on the floor of the Legislature - something the couple did not ask him to do.

So now, their church is punishing them for basically being active and interested citizens. So much for the separation of church and state.

But I can honestly understand this action. We are talking about a church, after all, that will quickly take an action on the issue of homosexuality, and spend decades covering up and transferring priests who are known to the church to be molesting young boys. That sounds “intrinsically disordered” to me.