Huh?  PCUSA agrees to ordain active homosexuals but declines to ordain homosexual marriages.

And the principle behind this would be what? 

This is "perspicacious" in Scripture how?

Hours after giving their blessing to ordaining noncelibate gays and lesbians, leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declined late Thursday to change the church's definition of marriage, in effect refusing to allow same-sex marriages within their denomination.


If the proposal had been approved, the church's definition of marriage would have changed from a commitment between "a woman and a man'' to "two people" and allowed church weddings in states that have legalized gay marriage.

The late-night decision to table the proposal and subject it to two more years of study caught many delegates at the denomination's gathering at the Minneapolis Convention Center by surprise, and there was a stunned silence as delegates absorbed the action.

One, Virginia Thibeaux of San Anselmo, Calif., said she was "devastated and disappointed" by the shelving of a decision on whether to change the church's definition of marriage. "It's the M.O. for Presbyterians to do more studying," she said.

Cindy Bolbach, the general assembly's moderator, said the proposal's failure indicated that delegates just weren't ready to make a decision on the marriage definition question, and "want to continue to talk about it."

Oh, it's the "more time to talk about it" principle.

Michael Liccione in the comments at Called to Communion offers this explanation:

I notice that the PCA has just approved ordaining actively gay and lesbian clergy while refusing to bless same-sex unions. As my friend and ex-colleague Kevin Staley-Joyce remarks: “The fact [that] this is an incremental compromise is evidenced by the logical incompatibility of the two decisions: If gay romance is not only ethical but healthy and appropriate for spiritual leaders, how can it not be enshrined in a church marriage?”


This whole kabuki dance is evidence that mainline Protestantism has simply lost a truly Christian understanding of sexuality as well as of ordination. Many of the more conservative Protestants, of course, still insist that sodomy is wrong and that same-sex “marriage” is an abomination. They say that stance is biblical. Indeed it is, if we assume that what the human authors meant then is what God means even now—an assumption that the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations increasingly rejects. But once it’s conceded that married couples may actively render infertile sexual acts that would otherwise be fertile, there simply is no logical barrier to holding that a sexual relationship can be good, even sanctifying, when the sexual acts are not the sort of acts that can lead to conception. That’s why resistance to same-sex marriage is slowly but steadily collapsing in the Mainline. The ordination of actively gay and lesbian clergy is only a stage in the dance.