With the acquittal of a lesbian minister Saturday after a church trial in Bothell, center stage in the Methodists' long-running debate over homosexuality shifts from the gay-friendly Pacific Northwest to an international arena that's far more straight-laced.
The Rev. Karen Dammann, 47, kept her ministerial credentials thanks to a favorable decision Saturday by a jury of 13 fellow United Methodist pastors from the denomination's Pacific Northwest Annual Conference, the church governing body that includes Washington state and Northern Idaho.
But the battle over homosexuality in the Methodist ministry is sure to be rejoined April 27 in Pittsburgh, when representatives of the 117 regional conferences around the world assemble in the General Conference, which meets every four years and determines church doctrine.
Homosexuality has been on the agenda every time since 1972, when the General Conference adopted a committee statement that "homosexuals not less than heterosexuals are persons of sacred worth. ..." -- but only after a floor vote added the phrase "... although we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider the practice incompatible with Christian teaching."
That started what a church panel on homosexuality recently called "a long and painful struggle ... which continues down to the present time."
Delegates from the Pacific Northwest have come down clearly on one side of the struggle. In the past three or four general conferences, the regional contingent has offered resolutions that would affirm the right of homosexuals to be ordained as ministers, said the Rev. James Finkbeiner of Port Townsend.
Finkbeiner prosecuted the case against Dammann. But even though he thinks the jury strayed from church doctrine, he has said he's personally glad that Dammann won her case.
The Methodists' Book of Discipline states that "self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be accepted as candidates, ordained as ministers or appointed to serve in the United Methodist Church."
Dammann would seem to fit the definition of self-avowed and practicing: In 2001, when seeking a new appointment as a church pastor after a family leave, she wrote to Pacific Northwest Bishop Elias Galvan, "I am living in a partnered, covenanted, homosexual relationship with another woman." That letter triggered the process that culminated in her trial.
In her defense, Dammann called retired Bishop Jack Tuell, an expert on church law, who testified that the prohibitions were fuzzier than they seemed.
"The jury just took that as a way of helping them redefine what they were doing," Finkbeiner said.
From the other side of the struggle, the Rev. James Heidinger II of Lexington, Ky., said that decision amounted to "jury nullification" of church doctrine.
"It seemed to so many ... that this was an open-and-shut case," said Heidinger, who leads a conservative, traditionalist movement in the church. "There was never any question about what Karen Dammann was involved in. She admitted that.
"I am stunned by the decision of this trial jury. That is a group, clearly, in the annual conference out there in Washington state, where they're really not -- they don't personally, themselves, embrace the church's position on this issue."
The Pacific Northwest conference, Heidinger said, is "very, very far to the left, very liberal on this issue, compared to the rest of the church."
The general conference, he said, has consistently rebuffed attempts to water down the existing prohibition on ordination of gay clergy.
The 1992 general convention voted 710-238 to keep the language of the prohibition, despite a task force recommendation to drop it because of the "lack of a common mind" on the issue, according to church records. A similar effort to eliminate the ban was rejected 577-378 in 1996. Those lopsided margins don't deter Larry Fox of Whidbey Island, who heads the Pacific Northwest branch of the national Reconciling Ministries Network, which supports ordination of gay Methodist clergy.
"We need some spiritual leadership from them (Methodists bishops) to say, 'Enough is enough: This church doesn't agree, and we're going to stop having a small majority trying to force its will on a significant minority,' " Fox said. "Otherwise, we look silly having trials."
Fox expects the Dammann case to sharpen the focus on the issue at the upcoming general conference.
Yesterday, Dammann went to church at Wallingford United Methodist with her partner, Meredith Savage, whom she married March 11 in Portland, shortly after officials there began allowing gay marriages.
"I feel really good," she said. "I feel like I've been through something. I'm tired."
She said her plans are uncertain beyond caring for the couple's 5-year-old son, who has a respiratory illness. She'll be staying with him near the boy's father in Oregon.
To return to the active ministry, she would have to seek an appointment from Galvan -- and going back to Ellensburg United Methodist, where she preached until taking family leave in February, would suit her fine.
"That would be a wonderful congregation to return to," she said. "They are just the best of the best."