PASTORAL ISSUES RELATED TO THE BLESSING OF SAME-SEX COUPLES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay was composed at the request of the National Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada to assist the church in considering the matter of the blessing of same-sex relationships. The following thoughts on pastoral issues related to blessing same-sex couples derive from my professional experience as a pastoral counsellor who has worked with lesbian/gay male (L/G) couples. Another source relates to presentations by students on being a sexual minority in society. In my Waterloo Lutheran Seminary course on "Marital/Couple Dynamics, " several lesbian students in committed couple relationships made class presentations on their sexual orientation, relationship dynamics, and perceptions of the hostile social context of homophobia and heterosexism. My first observation as a counsellor who has only occasionally worked with L/G clients as individuals or couples is that each couple is unique and that L/G couple relationships cannot be grouped in a class by themselves in contrast to "straight " relationships. My L/G couples generally came with a variety of presenting problems no different from what I heard from other couples: relational problems with no overriding reference to sexual orientation or same-sex
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".