With the love lives of priests in the news again, this time Miami’s Father Cutie’, a man torn between love of his tradition and love of a woman, people are asking if clergy restrictions based on gender, marital status or sexual orientation make sense these days? Should the Catholic priesthood be restricted to single, celibate men? Is it right that rabbis often find it more difficult to land a pulpit job if they are single? Or that the nation’s large synagogues are lead disproportionately by men?
In general, questions about who should and should not serve as clergy are strictly denominational issues and it is the height of arrogance for those outside a given community to pretend otherwise. In fact, there is nothing easier than pontificating about what others ought to do, especially when one does not have to sit next to them in the church, synagogue, mosque or temple. At the same though, the decision made by any group about whether or not to ordain individuals who may be gay, married, single, celibate or sexually active, does have implications about which all people can properly voice an opinion.
There is no right answer as to who should or should not be ordained, and no position which is more clearly “in line with God’s will”, no matter how strongly advocates on any side of these divisive issues claim. But each decision that is made carries with it a real price.

Whatever decision any denomination makes, they need to be as scrupulous and sensitive about the cost of their decision and completely honest about who carries that cost. That, more than the decision they make, is often the test of the community.
In fact, the really religious work begins once the decision has been made, not during the theological jousting which generally precedes making it. For example, how will a group that denies ordination to gay people, address the inevitable situation of treating gays as spiritually second-class? On the other hand, how will groups which do ordain gay men and women handle the moral superiority which inevitably shapes the discourse of groups that define themselves as “more inclusive”?
They may be more inclusive, but they are rarely less obnoxious than those they oppose. After all, and just like the groups with which they disagree, they are sure that God is on their side. And that certainty brings down even the best of causes.
As with most important decisions, ordaining clergy is less a matter of getting it right than it is about making sure that correctives are built in to address the inevitable shortfalls of whatever policy a community decides upon. That and the willingness to regularly re-visit past decisions in honest and ongoing conversation are what make for a healthy spiritual community, whomever they choose to ordain.