St. Matthews Episcopal Church Website

I travel a good bit for work.  Generally I drive through places with poor radio reception.  That means I often get to spend more time alone with my thoughts than is probably good for me!

 On a recent trip I began thinking about the same sex issue with which the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are struggling right now. To be fair, I lean towards the conservative side of this issue but not so much that I couldn't be persuaded to think differently.  I'm generally a fair-minded guy and can see both sides of an issue, I generally don't become so entrenched that my investment is emotional to the point of overlooking logic, and I am willing to change when I can see merit in one's position.  So I write this to be more searching for an answer than proving a point.

What got me thinking about this was an NPR report I heard regarding a convicted child molester.  And while I'm certainly not equating child molesting with the issue of Gay priests, what I heard was troubling to me. Those in the report were saying that "These people are born this way", "it's not their fault that they have these tendencies", and that "they need to be locked up because they can't control themselves and its proven they will do these things again".

I was troubled because I recall hearing some of these same types of arguments (with the exception of locking them up!) as we've traveled through the same sex situation the church is facing now.  The arguments were made that gay priests were "no different than the rest of us", "they were just born with these preferences", that "they are as deserving of our love and respect as well as all the benefits the church has to offer as any heterosexual person or couple".  Mind you I'm paraphrasing the statements in quotes in both paragraphs above, but I think they sound like fairly good representations of the things I was hearing and reading. 

Here is the issue I have - When we use arguments like those above as justification for a person's behavior and how we corporately respond to them, how do we know where to stop?  Today, as a society, we have accepted homosexuals in ways that, before, were not acceptable.  So things have changed for the better for them and, while some might argue that we still have a ways to go, and I might agree with that, we have socially changed the playing field, so to speak. 

In many ways this field is changed forever and only time and history will truly allow us to know if we made a good decision.  Now, some might suggest that the homosexual issue doesn't harm anyone as it is a relationship between consenting individuals.  Yet recent news stories of teachers having sexual relationships with their consenting students have surfaced.  Many news outlets couched that story in those terms while more conservative outlets talked of the teacher as a molester.  Fifty years ago, labeling someone as a homosexual drew the same reaction from the majority of our population as labeling someone as a child molester does today.  But that has now changed.

Our society is a society of laws and as such the law is a continually growing and adapting thing.  At one point in our society it was acceptable to own blacks as slaves.  We saw that was wrong and fought to make sure it got changed. We also wrote laws to formalize the way we felt about that behavior.  When gay's and lesbian's began to ban together politically they exploited those same civil rights laws to argue for more inclusivity.  And they also used their "acceptance" in other organizational structures, like the churches, to validate to the larger secular community that gay and lesbian political acceptance was justified.  In essence, they used the Civil Rights laws and arguments to change their political and legal standing.

But in doing so additional arguments have been added to the mix.  Such as, simply being born that way somehow necessitates accepting behavior solely on the basis that the one behaving in currently unacceptable ways can't control that behavior because of their DNA.  I'm sure many men would love to have access to the argument that God made us naturally unfaithful so we would be able to insure the survival of our species.  We should therefore accept those same unfaithful men into the priesthood, and as Bishops, because God loves them just the same as the rest of us and they are no more broken than anyone else.  The same logic can be said to apply.

The same logic will, I fear, also be used at some point to justify acceptance of the same child molester that we today throw behind bars.  In the process of getting there I also fear that our beloved church will take the hit, in the name of loving acceptance and forgiveness, for helping drive the political and social engine that got us there.

Sometimes I think we feel that accepting unconditionally the behavior of others and providing them forgiveness is the true expression of the love Christ asked us to share with one another.  I think that is a far too simple expression of what he was commanding.  It's kind of like the inane chatter that occurs at a cocktail party, all banter and positioning with no real substance.  It's all too easy to do and requires no real responsibility on the part of those engaged.  I don't believe that acceptance and forgiveness can be that same type of hand waving, negating the responsibility of the forgiver to help the one being forgiven deal with the brokenness in their lives.