Bishop Robinson’s Prayers

Posted by Tom McFeely

Monday, January 19, 2009 11:26 AM

At Barack Obama’s invitation, homosexual Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson offered prayers yesterday for the president-elect at an inaugural kick-off event at the Lincoln Memorial.

Here’s part of what Robinson prayed for, in an invocation directed to the “God of our many understandings”:

“Bless this nation with anger — anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people,” Robinson implored.

He then prayed: “Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.”

There’s little doubt that Robinson intended his prayer plug for an end to “discrimination” against “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people” to be interpreted as a call for recognition of same-sex “marriage.”

The problem with this, though, is that it’s not discrimination against anyone when society defines marriage as an institution that exists only between one man and one woman. Doing this is simply a societal affirmation of the constant and unchanging nature of marriage, which exists for two purposes: to unite the complementary natures of the men and women who marry, and to create new human life through the expression of the sexual complementarity of these married couples.

By definition no homosexual couple can fulfill either of these two basic dimensions of the marriage bond. But every human person, male or female, possesses the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.

Now, what about Robinson’s petition that Americans be blessed “with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians”? In today’s pro-homosexuality media context, every effort to uphold the truth about the meaning and purpose of marriage is greeted with a deluge of angry articles decrying these efforts as “homophobia.”

In this context, the easy and simplistic approach is to pretend that any homosexual relationship that declares itself to be a “loving” one should qualify for societal recognition as constituting an authentic “marriage.”

But we’re with you on this one, Bishop Robinson, about asking God to have the courage to spurn what’s comfortable. As a society, America must face the truth about the meaning of human sexuality and marriage.

And we must strive to uphold these truths against the easy and simplistic approach of redefining marriage merely to appease the homosexual lobby and its many media allies.

— Tom McFeely

Filed under bishop gene robinson, homosexuality, marriage, sexuality