There are a lot of questions I can't answer, Peter, which makes me different from some folks here.
Let's try to narrow the focus and maybe, just maybe, touch a bit of reality.
What I see in my brief exposure
to the document at hand is this. Again; I may not catch their real thing, but this is what I see.
1. We in the churches tolerate couples living together outside of the marriage bond. Our children do it; our council members do it; sometimes our parents and grandparents do it. Folks coming to us for weddings have usually been living together, sometimes for years.
2. But we insist that pastors and deacons have only one "valid" means of partnered living - marriage.
3. Is this fair?
4. Does this make marriage a kind of "norm" and the only way for people to form intimate living arrangements?
5. Can we discuss this with an eye towards recognizing - for pastors and deacons - the same tolerance in living arrangements as we grant to our laypeople?
That is how I see the discussion. Not quite as racy as swingers' parties or as lurid as prostitution, and - please note - not as easy to dismiss or bat down. (Spike that last thought; it's very easy for some people to dismiss and bat down. But not everyone.)
I'm late catching up on this, but Charles, I highlighted your point #3, and ask simply, what does "fair" have to do with anything? You, of all people, are aware that life is not
"fair" ("rains on the just and the unjust") by any stretch of the imagination, and
"fair" has utterly nothing to do with our call to obedience in the proclamation of Law and Gospel. If anything, our
"reality" is the ultimate
"unfairness" to which we seek to proclaim what God alone, has in fact done to redeem us and the whole of creation.
I can understand, and respectfully disagree, with the humanistic notion of the church striving to be fair, but the simple, and obvious, "reality" of all this LBGT+ and "naked and ashamed" stuff is plain and simple narcissism - or "sin", the self-turned inward, playing god.