Retired Presbyterian minister faces church court for performing gay marriages

<p>The Rev. Jane Spahr, a retired Presbyterian minister, faces prosecution by her own church — for the second time in four years — for officiating in the marriages of same-sex couples.</p><p>“Here we are again,” said Spahr, 67, who was acquitted by the church's highest tribunal in 2008, capping a two-year disciplinary case that started with a trial in Santa Rosa in 2006.</p><p>Spahr, who lives with her son and 6-year-old granddaughter in San Francisco, freely acknowledges the church's allegations that she married a lesbian couple in June, 2008, and 15 other same-sex couples that year.</p><p>“This is what we are called to do,” Spahr said, asserting, as she did before, that she conducted the marriages as a “matter of conscience.”</p><p>But there is a new twist to the case. The 16 marriages that allegedly violate Presbyterian church law were conducted during the five-month period in 2008 when same-sex marriage was legal in California.</p><p>Spahr's defender in the case, Scott Clark, said the church is “trying to sanction a minister for performing legal marriages. This is unprecedented.”</p><p>JoAn Blackstone, who is the prosecutor, said the distinction is immaterial. The marriages may well have been legal under state law, she said, but were “expressly prohibited” by the same ruling that acquitted Spahr in 2008.</p><p>Blackstone said the case hinges on “a narrow issue of church law” and is unrelated to the public debate over same-sex marriage.</p><p>Gay rights issues, including same-sex marriage and the ordination of gays and lesbians, have sharply divided the 2.3-million member U.S. Presbyterian Church for more than 30 years.</p><p>An amendment to the church constitution allowing gays and lesbians to be ordained as ministers was approved by the church's national governing body in 2008, but failed to win ratification by a majority of the 173 regional presbyteries.</p><p>The Presbytery of the Redwoods, which is prosecuting Spahr and represents 54 congregations from Marin County to the Oregon border, voted in February to submit a motion to the General Assembly to allow both marriages and ordination.</p><p>The assembly's next meeting is in Minneapolis in July.</p><p>Blackstone, who headed the local presbytery committee investigating the Spahr case, said it found “we really don't have any wiggle room” in deciding to press charges.</p><p>Spahr retired in 2007 from a Redwood Presbytery ministry to gays and lesbians. If convicted by the church court, she faces sanctions ranging from public censure to a prohibition against performing ministerial duties, including marriages, Clark said.</p><p>In the 2006 case, Spahr was accused of marrying two lesbian couples, one of them in a ceremony on the Sonoma coast in 2005.</p><p>The church's Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly, its top judicial body, cleared Spahr. But it also held that Presbyterian ministers may not “state, imply or represent that a same-sex ceremony is a marriage,” affirming the church's definition of marriage as a contract between a man and a woman.</p><p>Spahr's own lawyers said Spahr would risk future prosecution by continuing to marry same-sex couples.</p><p>“It really doesn't matter to me what they might do,” Spahr said a day after the ruling on April 28, 2008. “I must do what I was called to do.”</p><p>Less than two months later, Spahr officiated at the wedding of her defender in the original case, Sara Taylor, and Taylor's longtime partner, Sherrie Holmes, at the Marin Civic Center in San Rafael on June 20, 2008.</p><p>Taylor said it was a “shotgun wedding,” prompted by the California Supreme Court's ruling a month earlier that legalized gay marriage.</p><p>“I saw them fall in love over 20 years ago,” Spahr said last week. “It was such an honor to be with them.”</p><p>California voters approved Proposition 8 in November, 2008, restoring the state's prohibition on gay marriage. More than 11,000 same-sex couples married in California while their unions were legal.</p><p>Spahr, ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1974, said it “never crossed my mind” to stop marrying same-sex couples the same way she married opposite-sex couples. </p><p>“It's a real faith issue for me,” she said. “I think I would be in jeopardy if I didn't do it.”</p><p>The charges against Spahr, formalized earlier this month, said that she had “publicly, intentionally and repeatedly” violated church laws and “failed to further the peace, unity and purity of the church.”</p><p>Blackstone, the prosecutor, said Spahr was a “highly esteemed” minister in the local presbytery. “This isn't about her character,” she said. “It's only about church law.”</p><p>Blackstone, an inactive attorney who lives in Little River in Mendocino County, declined to elaborate on her role in private life as a longtime gay rights advocate.</p><p>“I don't think that characterization is relevant to this case,” she said.</p><p>Her late husband, Elliott Blackstone, a former San Francisco police sergeant, was the first police officer in the nation assigned to work with the gay and lesbian community in 1962.</p><p>She's wonderful,” Spahr said, calling JoAn Blackstone “a dear friend.”</p><p>Clark, who is handling Spahr's defense, is a retired attorney in San Anselmo and a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry.</p><p>Spahr's disciplinary action began in Santa Rosa in 2006, when the Presbytery of the Redwoods held her initial trial at the Church of the Roses, deemed a neutral site.</p><p>The trial cost about $30,000 and ended in a 6-1 vote in Spahr's favor. </p><p>The local presbytery appealed, and a mid-level church commission convicted Spahr of violating church law on a 6-2 decision, setting up the third and final hearing by the top judicial commission.</p><p>Spahr's trial on the new charges will be held in August or September at a location to be determined.</p><p>Her clerical career has been marked by controversy. Her appointment to co-pastor a Rochester, N.Y., congregation was invalidated by the church's high court in 1992.</p><p>The next year Spahr was named as a “lesbian evangelist” by the Rochester church in collaboration with the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon.</p>