The United States Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states drew the Orthodox Church’s attention to LGBTQ issues in a new way. Now that same-sex couples had access to civil marriage, the Church needed to decide whether it would recognize the sanctity of same-sex unions by granting admittance to the sacrament of marriage. The contours of this ecclesial conversation reflected many of the tensions already exhibited in the earlier Orthodox and Catholic responses to the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, beginning in the 1970s.
