MCJ: HOUSE RULES

From Midwest Conservative Journal:

Friday, October 31st, 2008

There are two subjects I don’t like to cover here unless I absolutely have to. One of them is John Shelby Spong. I already know the answer to “Do you know what Spong just said?” The megalomaniacal old fraud said something stupid, anti-Christian and completely unsupportable by any honest person with even a smattering of theology, Church history or an ability to read.

The other is Gene Robinson. As everyone knows, Gene’ll knock your 2-year-old daughter to the ground in his zeal to tell a group of reporters and television cameras that he just wants to be the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire so I really don’t want to feed the habit of that publicity junkie. But it seems Robbie was in a chatty mood the other day:

Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson said he led a confidential retreat a few years ago for gay Roman Catholic priests.

About 75 Catholic clergy from around the U.S. participated without notifying their bishops or provincial leaders, Robinson said. In 2005, the Vatican issued a document affirming the church’s stance that men with “deep-seated” attraction to other men should not be ordained.

The retreat was held outside of New England, but Robinson would not say where.

Come on, Robbie. How are their bishops going to know where to send the wood for the auto-da-fes?

Robinson briefly discussed the retreat during a question-and-answer session after a viewing Saturday of a documentary featuring his life story called, “For The Bible Tells Me So,” according to The Laconia Daily Sun.

The film makes a link between sexism and anti-gay prejudice, contending that, “at its root, the hatred of gays is driven by a hatred and second-class status of women,” Robinson said.

The Roman Catholic Church hates women? Who knew? I guess that accounts for all the Hail Josephs those people are always saying. Some of us have a real theological problem with Rome’s Josepholatry, frankly. And I guess that’s why all Catholic saints are male. You know, like St. Christopher of Siena and St. Theodore of Lisieux.

Idiot.

“I had said to them, ‘It’s too dangerous for you to come out as gay to your superiors, but I believe that if you work for the ordination of women in your church, you will go a long way toward opening the door for the acceptance of gay priests,” Robinson said.

Robbie may have stumbled into an actual point there. Just before women were ordained in the Episcopal Church, the wife of the rector of my old joint was studying at the United Church of the Zeitgeist seminary across the street, evidently figuring that women’s ordination in the Episcopal Church was a done deal.

She joined my old place, eventually becoming associate rector. And I used to dread her sermons. She was the sort of preacher who thought that connecting with the congregation was way more important than actually communicating something useful about the Gospel.

She talked about herself a lot. And she was the sort of person who injected emotion into her words whether what she said called for it or not. She didn’t just buy lettuce at the supermarket yesterday, she bought LETTUCE at the SUPERMARKET YESTERDAY!!

This style and approach(and this woman was by no means unique) went a long way toward making the Episcopal Organization what it is today; a body where doctrine is not particularly important but how one feels about doctrine is. Women’s ordination did not start this process(the Episcopalians were well on their way prior to 1974) but it did benefit from it.

Because a serious case for it was never made. To its supporters, women’s ordination was so obviously correct that having to make a case for it suggested that people who disagreed with the idea had perfectly valid reasons for doing so. And such bigotry was not to be tolerated.

The same dynamic was in play when Robbie got his pointy hat. To Robbie’s supporters, no case needed to be made because it just felt right.

So anybody who demanded a justification(a serious one, not TEO’s spirit doing a new thing, God not knowing about committed same-sex relationships or any of the other absurd and borderline-blasphemous ones they’ve come up with over the years) had to be a bigot for resisting something so obviously correct.

With Gene Robinson, we see the triumph of emotion over Scripture in the Episcopal Organization because Robbie is all emotion. If you and the Word of God think that homosexual sex is a sin, you and the Word of God don’t merely disagree with Robbie. You hate him.

And he doesn’t have to justify himself to bigots.