How the Other Answer Is Actually Argued

A body that has not adopted full inclusion rarely states its position as a bare refusal; each gives its own reasoning in its own vocabulary. The Southern Baptist Convention's confessional statement, the Baptist Faith and Message, defines marriage as the uniting of one man and one woman in a covenant commitment and offers no path to ordination outside that definition. The Assemblies of God's position paper, revised by its General Presbytery in 2014, argues from the same marriage definition to a specific conclusion about leadership, that a person in a same sex relationship should not be ordained or serve in a role that models the Fellowship's teaching to others. Rome states a narrower and more recent distinction: Fiducia Supplicans, the Vatican's 2023 declaration, permits a priest to offer a brief, non liturgical blessing to a same sex couple while insisting this is not an approval of the union itself and does not equate to marriage, a position African bishops meeting the following year publicly declined to implement in their own dioceses. The Anglican Communion offers a fourth shape of answer altogether. Its 1998 Lambeth resolution upheld traditional marriage, but the Communion binds no province to it; the Scottish Episcopal Church has married same sex couples since 2017 while other provinces hold 1998 as settled teaching, so the Communion's honest answer is that it has none common to all forty two of its churches.