It’s a bit after the fact now, but there’s another aspect of Rev. Robinson’s election to bishop of New Hampshire that bears some discussion. About 85% of the discussion has been on “He’s gay! He’s gay!” with another 14% on “His election will tear apart the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Union!” Since I thought these were both poor arguments against the confirmation (Luke 12:51ff seems to counter the latter, at least), I was left supporting it.
But there’s another argument that’s been brought up — and largely because Lileks raises the matter this morning, it’s worth at least touching on, after the fact:
This story has irritated me from the start, and it has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson’s sexual orientation. The guy left his wife and kids to go do the hokey-pokey with someone else: that’s what it’s all about, at least for me. Marriages founder for a variety of reasons, and ofttimes they’re valid reasons, sad and inescapable. But “I want to have sex with other people” is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they’re sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake. There’s a word for people who leave their children because they don’t want to have sex with Mommy anymore: selfish.
[…] If he’d cast off his family to cavort with a woman from the choir, I’m not sure he’d be elevated to the level of moral avatar – but by some peculiar twist the fact that he left mom for a man insulates him from criticism. It’s as if he had to do it. To stay in the marriage would have been (crack of thunder, horses neighing) living a lie, and nowadays we’re told that’s the worst thing anyone can do. Better to bedevil other lives with the truth than inconvenience your own with a lie. Right? If others are harmed in the short run, eventually they will be happy because you’re happier. Right?
Divorce is a tricky one. Being previously divorced myself, I obviously have a certain bias in the issue. I’m also one for taking responsibility for one’s actions, and sticking by one’s commitments. I also don’t know as much as, perhaps, I ought about the details of Rev. Robinson’s life and how he ended his relationship with his wife and daughters.
I will note that the situation is not directly analogous to “if he’d cast off his family to cavort with a woman from the choir” — for the same reason that arguing that “he’s fooling around out of wedlock” is not a valid criticism. Until we, as a society, tolerate and formally recognize gay relationships, up to and including marriage, we cannot, as a society, criticize gay individuals for not being good, upstanding, married individuals. Critiquing Robinson for not marrying his partner should be, on the face of it, goofy, given that he cannot marry him under current civil and religious law; that folks continue to make that argument shows they don’t get the point. Lileks is not doing this directly, but to say that there’s no difference between a man acknowleding he’s gay and turning to the intrinsic subject of his affections, and a man deciding that, no, he’d rather be hitched to a different woman than the one he chose, is to make a similar argument.
Marriage is about more than sex. But were I suddenly to find myself single, I cannot imagine having a relationship — even excluding sex — with a gay man as close as what I could have with a straight woman.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a society that accepted who I fell in love with and chose to partner with, and that accepted that partnership as something good and worth nurturing with the force of law and culture. I’m willing to cut someone who did not have that advantage a certain measure of slack when confronted with that situation.
But …
Kids are a different matter, and that’s where I’m closest to Lileks’ position. Short of a situation where there’s violence in the home, I’m reluctant to give a pass to anyone leaves their kids, even with all the agreement and acceptance and visitation in the world. A case-by-case basis, perhaps. But “living a lie” isn’t an automatic gimme. There is an intrinsic commitment to children beyond what one has to one’s spouse, and sucking it up and soldiering on seems to be a more morally defensible position than not — no matter what the gender of the snuggy-boo you’re running off to hang out with.
There may be other factors involved. But that’s my first stand on the position.
That all being said … I’m still willing to give that decision up to the electors in New Hampshire, who, presumably, weighed it in their decision, as I don’t know that I consider it something that would disqualify Rev. Robinson outright, or should have properly denied his confirmation. But it is, to my mind, a better ground to criticize the qualifications of Robinson than those which were used.
You know, I saw one of his daughters on stage with him and I would put her age at something between her mid-20’s and early 30’s.
Dave, go back into the Way Back Machine and remember how the world was when Robinson probably got married. If memory serves, the American Psychiatric Association was still classing homosexuality as a mental illness.
We had a friend in Rev. Robinson’s situation. He married because he honestly believed the prevalent attitude of the time–that those homosexual yearnings he felt were “an abberration” “a phase he could grow out of with the love of a good woman”.
He did his absolute best, but those feelings didn’t go away.
When we talk about homosexuality, I think it’s important to realize that the current openess about it is a relatively new phenomena. When you’re judging someone’s behaviour, I think it’s important to set it in the context of the time in which it happened.
Hence my “cutting some slack” comments above. I don’t in any way pretend that Rev. Robinson’s life has been easy, that dealing with his orientation has been simple or trivial or straightforward.
But regardless, I think he had a commitment to his children that, whether they support and agree with him today or not, he did not fulfill. Though it sounds like his divorce from his wife was something they both agreed upon (and, being divorced myself, I cannot and would not criticize him for divorcing per se), the impact it had on his children (“Divorce is never a good time,” one daughter, Ella, says), both the event of it and his subsequent degree of absence in their lives, has to be weighed heavily against that.
Robinson was divorced in 1987 (or 1986 — I’ve seen both dates cited). Ella, who was at the convention is 21. I make her then to be 3-4 when they divorced. To me, that’s a real problem.
The truth, Robinson says, is that he confided doubts about his sexual orientation to his wife even before they were married. Only after years of therapy did the couple decide to divorce, returning their rings to each other in a religious service and pledging to continue to raise their daughters together. Robinson says he did not meet his current partner, Mark Andrew, until after his wife had remarried, and he remains close to his ex-wife and children today.
Which says to me that both he and his wife exercised very poor judgment, both in marrying in the first place, and in having two children.
I feel for him, and for his ex-wife. I don’t want to trivialize the pain in their lives at all. And I think if New Hampshire decided on him, even this judgment issue is not sufficient to disqualify him. But still matters more to me than the other shibboleths that were raised.
I would have to concur with Lileks on this, I consider it abandonment on the part of Robinson for selfish motives. My father left my mother for his high school girlfriend. I chalk them up as the same reasoning: personal gratification.
Concerning Marn’s last paragraph, I don’t think I can buy the argument about incorporating the “group think” of the time period. If we do this for Mr. Robinson, then why do we not also use this logic when considering other issues, such as slavery? At the time, it was commonly accepted as the natural way of things.