LOUISVILLE, Ky., April 30 (UPI)

The Presbyterian Church USA has cleared a minister of performing same-sex marriages on the grounds that the unions she blessed aren’t marriages.

The church’s permanent judicial commission, in a ruling released Tuesday, reversed a ruling by a lower church panel that found the Rev. Jane Adams Spahr of San Rafael, Calif., guilty of misconduct, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The commission, the church’s highest court, which is based in Louisville, Ky., said that unions between two women are not marriages. Therefore, it said, the lower court “found Spahr guilty of doing that which by definition cannot be done.”

Spahr, who has been an open lesbian for 30 years, recently retired as head of That All May Freely Serve, a group that advocates for gay ministers. She said that she had mixed feelings about the decision.

“In not seeing same-gender marriages as marriages, the commission holds

to the idea that we are separate and unequal,” Spahr told the Times in a telephone interview. “And that causes me great pain.”

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