About 100 faculty, students and staff from Iliff School of Theology held a protest vigil Thursday outside Denver's United Methodist headquarters to decry two recent homosexual rights rulings.

"A very sad and offensive decision" is what Iliff's interim president, Phil Wogaman, called the ruling of the church's highest court. The judicial council said a Virginia pastor had the right to bar a man from membership in his church because he refused to repent his homosexuality.

Wogaman said it's possible that the local bishop in Virginia could seek a reversal of the high court ruling. Iliff is a United Methodist seminary.

Church documents say "the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching." Other resolutions acknowledge that sexuality is a complex issue and homosexuals "need the ministry and guidance of the church."

The Stroud decision was decried by the Rev. Gil Caldwell, a former member of the Iliff board of trustees and a retired United Methodist minister who is working for gay rights in the church.

Caldwell, who worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, told the crowd that Stroud faces a worse situation than even the late Rosa Parks, who became an icon of freedom by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.

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