An ally down the aisle: the Presbyterian Church USA forbids Stephen Van Kuiken to marry gay couples, but the Cincinnati pastor promises to stand his ground. (Religion).

For the past 3 1/2 years, Stephen Van Kuiken, pastor at Cincinnati's Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church, has done what religious leaders everywhere often do: He's married people.

And for Van Kuiken, a 44-year-old straight married man, that practice has included marrying about 10 same-sex couples with exactly the same religious ceremony his church uses for heterosexual marriages. There's a certain inevitability to it, he says. After all, about 40% of Van Kuiken's 300-person congregation is gay or lesbian.

But this practice recently run afoul of religious conservatives in the Presbyterian Church (USA), who said Van Kuiken was violating biblical law and the church constitution. They demanded that he be charged for marrying homosexuals and ordaining "unrepentant" sexually active gays and lesbians as church leaders. And on April 21 a church court found Van Kuiken guilty on the first charge.

Though his sentence--a public rebuke--is the mildest punishment he could receive, the very fact that there was a trial at all underscores the obstacles same-sex couples continue to face when consecrating their relationships through any institution, spiritual or otherwise. Furthermore, the trial also is a reminder that the pitched conservative battle against equal marriage rights on the civil front is mirrored on the ecclesiastical front.

"When I do Christian marriages for GLBT folks, it's obvious we can't do the civil aspect, and that is a matter of injustice," says Van Kuiken, who has appealed the verdict against him. "Just as when a straight couple gets married in the church it is an expression of faith, the same thing ought to be available for GLBT folks. It is a matter of fairness and justice and love and affirmation."

With 2.5 million members, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is one of the largest and most powerful denominations in the country. Though it has had a long history of tolerance and advocacy on issues such as women's rights and the abolition of slavery, experts say there are fault lines running through the denomination, pitting right-wing evangelicals against more moderate elements.

"Homosexuality is just part of the story; there is a larger struggle going on within the PCUSA right now," says J. Terry Todd, an American religious studies scholar at Drew University in Madison, N.J. "There is a hard-right-wing insurgency within the church determined to roll back the clock on the Presbyterian Church's historical social justice witness."

The issues of gay representation and gay marriage in the church are at the center of that struggle. In 1997 the denomination amended its constitution to stipulate that in order to be ordained as a church leader, a person must live in a committed heterosexual relationship or be chaste.

Then in 2000 the church ruled that pastors could perform "holy unions" for same-sex couples but that those ceremonies must be distinct from marriage ceremonies. That meant pastors could use none of the liturgical language associated with marriage when performing holy unions. It also meant that many of the traditional customs associated with marriage--the kiss, the exchange of vows and rings, and anything that might refer to a sexual union, for example--had to be excluded from holy unions, experts say.

"They just drained the words holy union of all their meaning," says Van Kuiken.

The differences between a holy union and a marriage are especially profound for some of Mount Auburn's members. Jennifer and Cheryl McKettrick, who were wed by Van Kuiken in 2000, say they wanted to get married before they had a child together.

"It was important for us to go through this ceremony before we brought [our child] into this world," says Cheryl, who adds that the church ceremony also helped validate their relationship in the eyes of family and friends.

Jennifer, who serves as a deacon at Mount Auburn, says holy unions do not carry the same weight as marriages and that they relegate gay people to second-class status. "It says our relationships are not as valid as heterosexual marriages," she says.

Similarly, Paul Brownell and Jack Harrison say they wanted a ceremony in which their marriage was both witnessed and blessed by their church congregation. To accomplish that, a holy union was not enough. "No one knows what the liturgical language is [for a holy union]," says Harrison, a seminary graduate. "No one has written a liturgy for blessing a couple committing itself to a relationship that does not include the blessing of their sexual relationship and whole lives together."

Harrison's wedding, like the others, was cited during the trial as evidence of "wrongdoing" by Van Kuiken. "It was painful to have our relationship denigrated in that way in such a public setting," he says. "I mean, we had a nice, big church wedding and lots of people from our respective places of employment and family, and it was as traditional a wedding as you could have."

For their part, church leaders say they were only following the denomination's constitution when they found Van Kuiken guilty. "The constitution repeatedly defines marriage as between one man and one woman; it says it seven different places," says Martha Cross Sexton, moderator for the Permanent Judicial Commission for the Presbytery of Cincinnati. "We are not allowed to have a judgment of whether that's right or wrong."

Still, that's a position that rankles even heterosexual members of Mount Auburn's congregation. They believe such a narrow definition of marriage is an extreme that's at odds with the true spirit of Presbyterianism. "Our point of view is that the church should take the lead in calling relationships that are loving 'Christian marriages,'" says church member Brandon Wiers. "The church has been on the wrong track since 1978, when it was decided that the scripture required homosexual relationships to be called sinful. That was the start of what amounts to fundamentalist revival."

Meanwhile, Van Kuiken says he will continue performing same-sex marriage ceremonies and ordaining openly gay church leaders. "I have told [church leaders] that I will continue to do it," he says. "I have weighed the consequences, and we will just see where the chips fall."

Quittner has also written for The New York Times and Business Week.