Perhaps it did not matter that gospel truth on marriage had changed before: Doug Theuner, Robinson’s predecessor as the eighth diocesan bishop of New Hampshire, pointed out the irony of one prominent lay leader who left the church after Robinson’s election, exclaiming incredulously about the departed, “He’s divorced!” While no biblical passage depicts Jesus condemning homosexuality, he did denounce divorce; yet “the church has come to accept divorce. The church has changed its mind about divorce.” In Theuner’s eyes, animus toward homosexuality was not about faith or biblical devotion; rather, this attitude reflected a cultural prejudice that those holding it “use the tools of faith to justify.”58
To those who cheered Robinson’s election and remained within the church—and to those watching approvingly from other religious denominations—the successful election of a gay bishop augured for the church a new day of loving inclusion for all genders and all sexual minorities. The church could now embrace all of these human beings, not condescendingly as sick or suffering persons on account of their unfortunate orientation but joyously as fully equal, fully healthy, and fully valued members of the church—and of humanity. For LGBT people and their allies, Robinson acquired something of the status of a saint, the very embodiment of grace in the face of prejudice, and of prejudice overcome. His outspoken feminism further endeared him to feminists as well, for he linked hatred of women to these other prejudices, repeatedly maintaining, “At their root, heterosexism and homophobia are expressions of misogyny.” He considered much of the current social and ecclesiastical turmoil a sign of (and reaction to) “the early stage of the end of male dominance, male superiority, and male privilege.” The “link between homophobia and misogyny” meant that “this battle over homosexuality is as much about the end of patriarchy as anything else.”59 His enthusiasts admired his outlook as much as his enemies despised it; for people on both sides, there was a crucial lesson to be learned in the outcome of, and the fallout from, New Hampshire Episcopalians’ choice of a gay bishop.
Christians thus remained profoundly divided on homosexuality, and denominational divides were often stark. Differences in views on the morality of homosexuality and same-sex marriage varied according to whether one were a biblical literalist or a flexible interpreter of Scripture, and they also tended to follow patterns pertaining to one’s overall view of the nature of gender and equality. These two worldviews both played significant roles in the political conflicts of the coming years.
NINETEEN DAYS AFTER ROBINSON’S DIOCESAN election, on June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that struck down Texas’s anti-sodomy law and the thirteen others that still remained. According to the justices’ reading of the Constitution, LGBT people deserved privacy and dignity no less than heterosexuals. While Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion and a concurring opinion by Justice O’Connor both noted that this decision did not indicate that same-sex marriage was warranted, Justice Scalia’s dissent warned that state laws prohibiting “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity” were all potentially destabilized by this decision’s invalidation of laws grounded in moral choices.60
Conservatives saw it more as Scalia did: lawmakers like Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, already on record for supporting anti-sodomy laws, denounced the Lawrence decision and the push for same-sex marriage, arguing again that marriage was “the union of a man and a woman.”61 Shortly after the Lawrence decision, two officials at the Alliance Defense Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom), a conservative Christian legal advocacy organization, coauthored The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, which argued that same-sex marriage “tramples religious freedom and leaves a trail of broken bodies in the dust.” Gay people did not want marriage so that they could gain equal benefits; rather, “they want marriage so they can take a wrecking ball to the institution itself.” In their hands, “marriage will be no better than anonymous sodomy in a bathhouse.”62 Indeed, with the anti-sodomy statutes removed, the push for same-sex marriage could move forward.
Just a few months after that ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts declared a right to marriage for same-sex couples in that state, in its ruling on Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. The Massachusetts court stated clearly that the state constitution “affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals” and “forbids the creation of second-class citizens.” Importantly, the court followed one line of argument that had been presented in an amicus brief submitted by the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, along with a number of liberal religious groups: “The injection of religion—indeed any religious view—into civil marriage by the Trial Court is particularly inappropriate in light of the great diversity of opinion among voices of faith with regard to marriage,” the brief stated. The court concurred, noting that there were “religious, moral, and ethical” arguments on both sides of the debate, but none was relevant to a decision about civil marriage. Quoting Lawrence, the court noted, “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our moral code.” The court rejected the arguments put forward in another amicus brief by the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, including one that asserted the unnaturalness of same-sex sexual relations and concluded, “How can conduct subject to criminal penalties throughout history demonstrate the pedigree of a fundamental right?” The court also denied the claim that this decision would damage the institution of marriage itself; in fact, extending civil marriage bolstered its importance: “That same-sex couples are willing to embrace marriage’s solemn obligations of exclusivity, mutual support and commitment to one another is a testament to the enduring place of marriage in our laws and in the human spirit.”63
Back and forth went the states, and the nation. In 2004, the year after the Massachusetts court decision, President George W. Bush called for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman; three states had already amended their constitutions for this purpose. Religious leaders assisted this effort, as when Bishop Eddie Long, a prominent African American pastor of an Atlanta megachurch then numbering twenty-five thousand members, led a massive march in opposition to same-sex marriage. Long persistently called on black churches to become stronger voices in this fight, as it was not a top priority for most African American religious leaders. Some congressional leaders tried but could not pass a federal marriage amendment in this period, but voters in thirteen states that same year passed constitutional amendments enacting such a definition. Ten more states passed such amendments in the following two years.
In 2008 California’s Supreme Court struck down a state law against same-sex marriage, and same-sex couples began marrying in June. Legislatures and state voters continued to battle out amendments, and judges sometimes assessed those passed as unconstitutional. Barack Obama, running for president, went on the record as deeming marriage the union between a man and a woman and said he favored same-sex civil unions but did not support same-sex marriage. Months later, when LGBT rights advocates protested President Obama’s selection of the Reverend Rick Warren—a California-based opponent of same-sex marriage—to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, he compensated by adding to another inaugural event an invocation by the married Bishop Robinson.
The debate continued: Connecticut’s Supreme Court and Iowa’s Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage in 2008 and 2009, respectively, while other states battled it out. Many went the opposite way of Connecticut and Iowa: all told, by 2012, thirty-one states had moved to block legal recognition of same-sex marriage. The legal machinery erected in the first decade of the twenty-first century alone was vast, and its hodgepodge makeup was a glaring indicator of how profoundly split US citizens were on this question.
However, the tide began to turn when, in 2010, a US district court judge struck down a section of DOMA that had authorized the federal government to withhold
benefits from same-sex couples whose marriages were recognized under state law. Months later, the Obama administration said it would no longer defend DOMA. Two years after that, President Obama announced in a nationally televised interview that his views on same-sex marriage had evolved to the point that he could affirm his view that same-sex couples deserved the right to get married.
Months later, Gene Robinson published his second book, God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage, with an endorsement from the president. The book argued, among other things, that Jesus himself, that champion of the outcast, would have condemned any system set up to favor heterosexuals over homosexuals; it was hard, if not impossible, to imagine “Jesus joining in the wholesale discrimination against LGBT people.” Jesus would have offered love instead of hate, sympathy instead of stigma, justice instead of bigotry. Everything we know about Jesus, Robinson maintained, suggested that he would see the enduring, loving relationship enshrined in marriage between two men or two women as “life-giving and holy.”64 The book may not have persuaded the most conservative opponents—a review in one conservative Christian periodical castigated the book’s “undercurrent of self-centeredness” and “speculative” religious arguments—but it received a warm reception elsewhere and extensive media coverage in outlets like the National Public Radio program Fresh Air.65
The next year, 2013, Supreme Court rulings in two cases—US v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry—struck down more barriers to same-sex marriage and strengthened hopes that full and final legalization was forthcoming. But the court was divided, just as the nation remained. Many agreed with the skepticism Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito showed when, during oral arguments for Hollingsworth (the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 that had rendered same-sex marriage illegal), he asserted that same-sex marriage is an “institution which is newer than cellphones or the Internet.”66 Others jeered at the religiously narrow-minded homophobia they believed the Catholic justice betrayed in that remark. There was virtually no middle ground left.
In January 2015, the Supreme Court agreed to hear four cases on appeal from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose ruling had upheld bans on same-sex marriage in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. These would be consolidated into one, called Obergefell v. Hodges, and the decision promised to finally bring order to the nation’s marriage laws. Briefs were filed for and against same-sex marriage by religious groups. One came from a broad coalition of progressive religious organizations, groups, and leaders (including nearly two thousand individual clergy) who supported same-sex civil marriage. Among others, the brief was signed by numerous Episcopal Church officials, the United Church of Christ, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, as well as LGBT supporters within the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Lutheran Communion, the Society of Friends, and many more. Many “anti” briefs were also filed by religious organizations and leaders whose Christian commitments took them to a different stance from the progressives’. It could seem yet again that these were two Christianities, two religions that were born of the same roots but had very little in common—not mere strangers, they were enemies to one another.
Oral arguments in Obergefell took place in April. Among the hundreds of people who gathered outside the court on that day was Gene Robinson, now retired from the episcopate and a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. He had announced his divorce from his husband a year before, so the court’s decision would not have an impact on his own marital state, but personal impact hardly mattered—this had been a struggle for an entire people, of whom he was merely one. Euphoric and seemingly optimistic, he happily told a reporter that he could not have dreamed that same-sex marriage had a chance of being legalized nationwide so quickly. “To stand here today and to have all this happen in one lifetime is just astounding to me.”67
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional. The court’s majority opinion, stating that “no union is more profound than marriage,” maintained that it was wrong to imagine that gay and bisexual men and women “disrespect the idea of marriage”; to the contrary, they “respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.” The “equal dignity in the eyes of the law” sought by same-sex couples was granted to them by the Constitution—for them too, marriage was a fundamental right.68 While the scathing dissents issued by the four justices opposed to this ruling offered some comfort to the religious opponents of same-sex marriage, the full and equal right to marriage for same-sex couples was now the law of the entire land. President Obama lauded the decision, saying, “Today we can say, in no uncertain terms, that we have made our union a little more perfect.”69
The Episcopal Church’s General Convention was in session on the day the Supreme Court released its ruling, and one topic on the docket was whether to offer church blessings to same-sex marriages. Gene Robinson, still an active church leader, spoke for the majority of bishops in asserting that it was time for the church to open marriage to same-sex couples, who were “living out their lives in holy ways.” Opening up a path for them to marry “allows us to recognize this” and to “declare how far we have come.” The majority of delegates at the convention agreed, and, in a historic move, they voted to approve canonical and liturgical changes that granted marriage equality within the church. New marriage rites would alter the ceremonial language for weddings to be inclusive of same-sex couples, with no further definition of marriage as solely between a man and a woman. Clergy could refuse to officiate such a ceremony, just as they could refuse to officiate any wedding, and individual bishops had the ability to forbid clergy in their own dioceses from performing such rites between persons of the same gender. Still, the church’s official position now recognized the validity of same-sex marriage.70
Although the votes were overwhelmingly in favor of these changes, there were dissenters: one bishop stood at the convention to oppose opening marriage to same-sex couples, avowing that the church’s message to these couples should instead be, “Do you love your partner enough not to engage in sexual intimacy?” After the affirmative vote, twenty bishops signed a minority report dissenting from these changes and reaffirming the traditional definition of marriage.
More opposition came, in its usual forms. Ultra-conservative evangelical spokesman Franklin Graham, lamenting that the Supreme Court was “endorsing sin,” channeled Falwell in warning that “God could bring judgment upon America” for the ruling.71 Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly insisted that no court could ultimately change the “eternal truth” that “marriage is, and has always been, between a man and a woman.”72 Robert George, the Catholic past chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, repeatedly condemned Obergefell as an anti-constitutional seizure of power that rightly belonged to the people. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, pronouncing the Obergefell decision a “tragic error,” called it “profoundly immoral and unjust for the government to declare that two people of the same sex can constitute a marriage.”73 When, a year after Obergefell, Vice President Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, solemnized the wedding of two men who were White House staffers, prominent US bishops denounced the act as “a counter-witness” to sound Catholic doctrine.74
Even as wider societal attitudes toward homosexuality and LGBT people seemed to be shifting from general tolerance toward acceptance of full citizenship rights, resistance remained among those Christians still committed to what they saw as traditional values but what their opponents saw as the patriarchal, hierarchical model of the church. These conservatives, in both Catholic and Protestant camps, were completely at odds with other members of their own faith traditions who celebrated the ruling as a victory for justice, seeing it as a triumph for those hungering and thirsting for righteousness, a fulfillment of Jesus’s call to love one another above all. The
fight over same-sex marriage might be in the books, but reactions to it bespoke profoundly deepening divisions within American Christianity and across the nation writ large.
“IN THE FIRST FIFTY-SIX YEARS of my life,” Gene Robinson once mused during his time as bishop of New Hampshire, “I think I was known as a passionate preacher and communicator of the Gospel, lived out in my ministry as a parish priest, retreat center founder/director, program coordinator for the seven dioceses of New England, and assistant to the Bishop of New Hampshire.” Since his election, however, “you’d surmise from press reports that the only thing I care about is the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Christians in the church.”75 Many other people identifying as queer could make a comparable point: living rich and varied lives, caring about diverse issues of local and global import, embracing countless pursuits and commitments, reaching for any number of aims and aspirations, they have often been characterized by critics as unidimensional egotists narrowly fixated on sex and their own pleasure, whatever the expense to the nation.
Deplored as a faction of the broader liberal and secular humanist agenda, LGBT people continued to be targets of hate well into the twenty-first century; even when not targeted with vicious words or violence, they faced discrimination and treatment as second-class citizens. A year after Obergefell, there were still twenty-nine states where a person could legally be fired from a job, turned out of a hotel, and thrown out of an apartment simply for being gay, lesbian, or bisexual—thirty-one states for being transgender—and there was no recourse in the courts. Robinson expressed profound concern about this situation in 2016, noting that the LGBT rights movement to date had largely been funded by “white, upper middle-class gay men living on one of the two coasts.” With marriage won, those men’s lives were “pretty perfect,” and many were no longer donating to rights organizations focused on job protections. “It turns out that the more common face of a gay couple is not those two white, upper middle-class men arguing over where to have brunch on Sunday, but two African American lesbians raising two or more children at or below the poverty level in Mississippi,” Robinson declared. And to most LGBT men and women, job protections were more important than marriage: “They can live together and have a relationship without benefit of marriage easier than they can live without a job.”76 Robinson was right about the law: in August 2016, for instance, a federal judge ruled in favor of a Detroit funeral home owner who fired his transgender director on the grounds that gender transition violated the conservative Christian owner’s “sincerely held religious beliefs.”77 Other cases were pending, and most cases of this kind did not even make it to federal court. This issue had nothing to do directly with his own church, but it was a justice issue as well as a pastoral issue, and Robinson was ready for the fight.
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