Bishop Gene Robinson on His New Book ‘God Believes in Love’ & More

As you describe in your “Why Gay Marriage Now?” chapter, many Americans have been forced to confront their beliefs by a close friend or relative—or even a child or spouse—coming out. Obviously, that makes the debate more than an abstract argument over Scripture. But what about people who aren’t affected as closely? Have you seen a particular argument or way of looking at the issue be effective in changing people’s minds? What seems to be the X factor? 

There is no question that knowing someone gay or lesbian is the most compelling motivator for becoming an advocate for gay marriage. But those without those personal connections might come to that same advocacy by another route. For those who were a part of the civil-rights movement for African-Americans in the ’60s, or the women’s liberation movement of the ’70s, this struggle for full and equal (not special) rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people has a familiar ring. Fair-minded people want to live in a nation whose laws protect those who are discriminated against by a majority prejudiced against them. Some take up this fight when they see teenagers committing suicide because they have no hope for a fulfilling and happy life as a gay man or lesbian. For followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there is always the call to care for the most vulnerable, to welcome the stranger, and to fight for the marginalized and oppressed, and so their advocacy for gay marriage is an expression of their faith commitment. There are many roads to advocacy for gay marriage.

What was the missing piece for you? Did it take a crucial bit of scriptural or intellectual evidence in addition to your personal experience?

The first step, for a gay man like myself, was accepting my own sexuality as a gift from God, rather than a curse. Once I believed that it was good to be gay, I then wanted to be able to imagine a happy and fulfilling life for myself. But marriage for two men or two women seemed like an impossibly unreachable goal. And that’s why I credit Evan Wolfson, executive director of the national Freedom to Marry Coalition, with singing this song solo for years until many more of us believed it too and began to sing along. The hard part was loving myself and believing that God loved me as a gay man; believing in marriage for gay or lesbian couples was an easier leap into the joy and meaning of relationships and commitment.

Your denomination is one of the most liberal in the U.S., but as you point out, acceptance of gay marriage is not a done deal there, and even less so in the global Anglican communion. It’s perhaps easier to see how individuals change their minds, but how do you see the shifts happening on a church level? Does the Episcopal Church’s position influence others?

Actually, the Episcopal Church has dramatically changed in a very short period of time. Historically speaking, institutions are slow to change and usually resistant to any sudden moves—churches especially so. In 2003, when I was elected bishop, it was not at all certain that the Episcopal Church would consent to my election. They did, however, and in 2010 consecrated the second gay bishop in Los Angeles, the Rt. Rev. Mary Glasspool. Within seven short years, a controversial flashpoint had turned into something fairly routine and accepted. In 2012, the Episcopal Church authorized a provisional liturgy for the blessing of same-sex relationships and authorized its use for the blessing of marriages in those states where it is legal. These are astounding developments and would have been unthinkable only a short decade ago.

As for influencing others, I think it’s safe to say that other mainline denominations (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists) have been watching the developments in the Episcopal Church, to see if this controversy would weaken or even destroy us, before undertaking change themselves.

One doesn’t have to look far back into history to see how much religious traditions have changed on big issues over time and in some cases even apologized for their previous positions. More than a few times, those shifts have been attacked as fatal to the true faith. Why do you think that bigger history is so difficult to see when we’re fighting over contemporary issues?

Left to our own devices and passions, we human beings have a hard time seeing beyond what is immediately in front of us. While the issue of slavery and its grotesque inhumanity seem obvious to us now, it was not so obvious to slave owners then who argued—from scripture, no less—that slavery was a part of God’s plan. We have similarly rethought our understanding of women, disabled people, and the mentally ill. Rather than being “fatal to the true faith,” it seems to me that these changes have argued for a more true following of God’s will for us than past understandings of the faith have allowed. Faith is a dynamic and ever-changing process, not some fixed body of truth that exists outside our world and our understanding. God’s truth may be fixed and unchanging, but our comprehension of that truth will always be partial and flawed at best. Over time, hopefully, we get it righter and righter!

It is interesting to wonder what we accept today as morally just and good, which over time the world will come to understand as unjust and immoral. What I love about believing in a living God is that I believe God is constantly revealing God’s self to us over time, and with each succeeding generation, we come a little closer to understanding the mind of God. Perhaps we might be a little kinder to past generations in their misperceptions, in hopes that future generations will be kind in understanding and forgiving our own faults and cruelties.

There are intelligent Christians who say outright that tampering with what they call the “Biblical sexual ethic” is a compromise of the fundamental meaning of the gospel. (And I don’t just mean Tony Perkins or Maggie Gallagher!) How did this issue become, for some people, so central to the credibility of their faith?

Homosexuality and gay marriage has become, in the minds of some, the litmus test of faith. If one does not support the traditional understanding of scripture and 2,000 years of Christian traditional teaching on homosexuality and marriage, then he or she must not be a believer at all! Somehow, if one does not follow the traditional “party line” on sexuality, then one must have thrown out all the traditional teachings and understandings of one’s faith, which of course is simply not true. I would go so far as to say that conservative Christians—I would include conservative evangelicals, the religious right, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in this group—have made an idol of sexuality and homosexuality. That is to say, they have placed the comparatively lesser issue of sexuality above the greater issues of faith in importance: the Trinity, the humanity and divinity of Christ, God’s saving act in Jesus Christ, to name a few.

“As marriage is abandoned as largely irrelevant and unnecessary by many young heterosexuals, it is gay men and lesbians who are most defending and yearning for this traditional institution.”

I believe that these people have mostly been taught to think this way by their ordained leaders. The reasons for this, I believe, are more about politics, power, and money than about theology or faith. Manipulation of laity by some of their clergy leadership is the subject for another book, but let’s at least note that the demonization of gay people and gay marriage was intentionally chosen to divide us and to raise lots of money. Somehow, these lesser understandings, about which good people of faith can disagree, are being placed on a pedestal high above those essential assertions of traditional faith that have been our foundation for two millennia, and are being used as a litmus test to separate the false from the true believers. At the end of the day, this seems to me to be idolatry. Our understanding of the faith has always been in a state of change as we better and better comprehend God’s will for us. This change in our understanding is no more a challenge or threat to “the faith” than the changes that have preceded it.

Interviewed by David Sessions. Read the full article at : http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/21/bishop-gene-robinson-on-his-new-book-god-believes-in-love-more.print.html



‘God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage’ by Gene Robinson. 208 pages. Knopf. $24. Bishop Gene Robinson onstage at the 20th Annual GLAAD Media Awards held at NOKIA Theatre LA LIVE on April 18, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. (Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)

Scientist, Candidate and Planet Earth’s Lifeguard

Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a people’s political cause, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Brooklyn Heights. His wife, Lisa Feiner, confirmed his death.

 Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II technology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about them. Raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and trained as a biologist at Columbia and Harvard, he came armed with a combination of scientific expertise and leftist zeal. His work on the global effects of radioactive fallout, which included documenting concentrations of strontium 90 in the baby teeth of thousands of children, contributed materially to the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. From there it was a natural progression to a range of environmental and social issues that kept him happily in the limelight as a speaker and an author through the 1960s and ’70s, and led to a wobbly run for president in 1980. In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, Time magazine put Dr. Commoner on its cover and called him the Paul Revere of Ecology.

He was by no means the only one sounding alarms; the movement was well under way by then, building on the impact of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in 1962 and the work of many others. But he was arguably the most peripatetic in his efforts to draw public attention to environmental dangers. (The same issue of Time noted that President Richard M. Nixon had already signed on. In his State of the Union address that January, he said, “The great question of the ’70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?” And he followed through: Among other steps, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in December 1970.) Dr. Commoner was an imposing professorial figure, with a strong face, heavy eyeglasses, black eyebrows and a thick head of hair that gradually turned pure white. He was much in demand as a speaker and a debater, especially on college campuses, where he helped supply a generation of activists with a framework that made the science of ecology accessible.

 His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Although the rules were plain enough, the thinking behind them required leaps of faith. Dr. Commoner’s overarching concern was not ecology as such but rather a radical ideal of social justice in which everything was indeed connected to everything else. Like some other left-leaning dissenters of his time, he believed that environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality needed to be addressed as related issues of a central problem. A Critic of Capitalism Having been grounded, as an undergraduate, in Marxist theory, he saw his main target as capitalist “systems of production” in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation that emphasized profits and technological progress with little regard for consequences: greenhouse gases, nonbiodegradable materials, and synthetic fertilizers and toxic wastes that leached into the water supply. He insisted that the planet’s future depended on industry’s learning not to make messes in the first place, rather than on trying to clean them up. It followed, by his logic, that scientists in the service of industry could not merely invent some new process or product and then wash their hands of moral responsibility for the side effects. He was a lasting opponent of nuclear power because of its radioactive waste; he scorned the idea of pollution credit swaps because, after all, he said, an industry would have to be fouling the environment in the first place to be rewarded by such a program.

Daniel Lewis -New York Times See the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/us/barry-commoner-dies-at-95.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0