A report endorsing the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the practice of sex outside marriage is causing a furor in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The report was prepared by a Presbyterian task force on human sexuality, which voted in February to pass its recommendations on to the church’s General Assembly.

Most task force members argue that the report presents a sexual ethic that focuses on justice.

Opponents, including task force members whose opinions were in the minority, say it ignores the Bible.

“The moral norm for Christians ought not be marriage, but rather justice-love,” the 200-page report states. “Rather than inquiring whether sexual activity is premarital, marital, or postmarital, we should be asking whether the relationship is responsible, the dynamics genuinely mutual and the loving full of joyful caring.”

The report’s recommendations, opponents argue, disregard traditional Christian morality in favor of the values of modern society.

“The majority has simply adopted the views of the culture,” said the Rev. David Searfoss, who led the group whose opinions were in the minority. “As the people of God, we’re obliged to listen to the word of God.”

But the Rev. John Carey, task force chairman, says the report breaks new ground for the church.

“We’re lifting up issues that, by and large, the Presbyterian Church has not previously wrestled with,” he said. “Our overall hope was to try to do something that would be helpful to the church.”

Carey defended the majority’s support of ordaining clergy without considering sexual orientation or activity.

“When we have heterosexual persons who present themselves for ordination, we do not ask them to discuss their, say, premarital sex histories, and we do not ask them to pledge themselves to a celibate life,” said Carey, a Bible and religion professor at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga. “Just in a sense of equity, we don’t think that it’s fair to ask that of gay and lesbian persons.”

But Searfoss disagreed.

“To be ordained is to promise to live by Scripture, and to change our ordination standards with regard to homosexual practice is to sanction a kind of behavior which the church has said is sinful,” said Searfoss, pastor of Calvin Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Ky.

The report, along with a dissenting minority report, will be considered by a committee of delegates attending the church’s General Assembly meeting in June in Baltimore.

Only after the assembly committee considers the two reports will they have any chance of being approved, amended or rejected by the 640 delegates who will represent the denomination’s 3 million members.

Any proposed change in the church’s constitution would have to be ratified by the presbyteries, the regional bodies of the church, which is the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the country.

Those opposing the majority report — and even those supporting it — wonder if it even has a chance of surviving once the General Assembly meets.

“I think the majority report is going to be rejected out of hand,” Searfoss predicted. “I think there’s not even the remotest possibility that it will be adopted by the assembly.”

Carey, too, has apprehensions that discussions will center only on homosexuality rather than the broad range of issues the report covers.

He said some presbyteries were sending resolutions to the General Assembly, requesting that it dismiss the whole report “out of anger over gay and lesbian issues.”

But when the committee majority decided to focus on the substance rather than the form of relationships, they had more than homosexuals in mind.

“The issue is not who people are but how they live in relationship to other people and with God,” said the Rev. Marvin Ellison, a member of the majority who is a Christian ethics professor at Bangor Theological Seminary in Bangor, Maine.

“The majority on the task force came to a consensus that single persons, gay men and lesbians, (and) divorced persons can live responsible, faithful lives as sexual persons just as heterosexual married persons can,” he said.

Though the majority views itself as interpreting the Bible differently than their dissenters, minority opinion members such as Searfoss said the report “jettisoned the authority of Scripture.”

Ellison disagreed, saying the majority was paying attention to the “heart of the Gospel.”

“What we differ with our minority members (about) is how to read the Bible and how to live faithfully in the contemporary world,” Ellison said.