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Siri Sunde
(May 15, 1958 - living) Norway

Siri Sunde

Lutheran pastor

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Several Church of Norway clergy said they can no longer accept spiritual guidance from Rosemarie Kohn, the Lutheran church's only woman bishop, who allowed a lesbian pastor to return to work.

Although gay and lesbian marriages are legal under Norwegian civil law, it violates church rules that bar openly homosexual people from ordained jobs.

Kohn's appointment of the pastor, Siri Sunde, came in part because the Church of Norway is a state church and clergy and government employees are protected by anti-discrimination laws.

While homosexuals are welcome at the Lord's Table in the Norwegian state church, without any distinction between "practicing" and celibate homosexuals, homosexual clergy are expected to live a celibate life. This is the stated policy of the Norwegian Bishops' Conference, formulated in 1995 and repeated in subsequent years.

Within a year, however, Sunde contracted a "recognized civil partnership", a secular marriage, with another woman, which they had "blessed", in defiance of the bishops' statements, by another female priest at an Oslo church. Reluctantly, and to avoid a clear violation of the rules that the bishops themselves had formulated, Koehn suspended the "differently partnered" Sunde from her chaplaincy for a year while awaiting a decision on whether to take up the case from the State Church's Doctrine Commission, a body consisting of all the bishops, some theology professors and some lay members of the Church Assembly.

On February 1, 1999, after the Doctrine Commission refused to consider the question, claiming that Siri Sunde's suspension was an employer/employee labor dispute about terms of employment rather a matter of doctrine, the bishop of Hamar issued a ruling that claimed that the Bible does not address the subject of homosexual "marriages", and therefore is silent on the issue, and therefore does not rule out the acceptability of such domestic arrangements, even for clergy. She then restored Siri Sunde to her original position.

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