UMC Judicial Council: Investigative committee made "egregious error"
The United Methodist Church's Judicial Council, the church's supreme court, sent a case against an openly homosexual minister back to a lower church court, saying an "egregious error" was made in refusing to bring charges against her. The church's Book of Discipline clearly forbids churches from appointing ministers who are "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals."

"Where the agreed facts concede a practice which the Discipline declares to be incompatible with Christian teaching, reasonable grounds exist to bring a bill of charges and specifications, and it is an egregious error of church law not to bring such a bill of charges and specifications," the council said.

The case against Karen Dammann is one of a two such cases involving the same church. The other, over gay minister Mark Williams, was dismissed last year when the investigative committee found "insufficient evidence" for charges.

The Washington Post rightly notes that the case "is testing the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy toward gay clergy in the Methodist Church." Would that the denomination's own news service took as balanced a perspective as the Post. Instead, it casts the case as persecution over disclosure, with the headline, "Clergywoman accepts 'cost of being truthful' about sexuality."

Yeah, that's what orthodox Methodists have a problem with: Dammann's honesty.

New York Timesnotices evangelicals' human rights work. Again. Late. Again. Weblog isn't complaining about the front page of Sunday's New York Times, which carried the headline "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad." The article was fair and accurate, and probably informed a lot of readers that evangelical politics ...