The Assembly agreed to the referral. Some General Assembly offices look for justification for their agenda in their interpretation of some action by a General Assembly at some time in the church s history. They often ignore recent Assembly decisions and resort to some obscure statement from decades past if it serves their purposes. That has been particularly true of abortion. There is a difference between a policy and a resolution according to the stated process for developing social witness policy.
Policy development is much more complicated and involved than a resolution.
Resolutions are single actions of G.A. s intended to aid the implementation of a policy. They have a large book called the Social Policy Compilation . Before this G.A., if you wanted to see what the policy on that subject was you would have to do a search of the index and take a guess based on the results of your search. That gave staff a free hand to implement their interpretation. The G.A. adopted the overture.