General Convention 2003
Remarks made by
The Reverend Philip W. Stowell
Adult Education Class
September 21, 2003
On the sheet that I have just passed out (from The Living Church), you will find a list of some of the accomplishments of the 74th General Convention of our church, which met in Minneapolis last month. General Convention meets every three years and is composed of 4 clergy and 4 lay persons from every Diocese (of which there are 116) in the country meeting as the House of Deputies. These deputies are elected by their respective diocesan conventions the preceding year. There are also 107 bishops meeting as the House of Bishops, who are bishops for life. Delegates vote by dioceses and are elected to vote their consciences. They are not bound to vote in any particular way on any given issue; the same is true for bishops. The two most newsworthy resolutions about which most of us have heard through the media are Resolution C051 and Resolution C045. Resolution C051 has no binding effect on anyone; it just recognized a given fact of life within the church. Resolution C045 was a procedural matter giving consent to the people of the Diocese of New Hampshire to allow the consecration of their new bishop to take place. This happens after anyone is elected a bishop, but if the election occurs within 90 days of the General Convention, the vote is taken at convention, otherwise bishops and diocesan standing committees are individually polled, which usually takes a bit longer. C051 received 58 and 62 lay and clergy, respectively, “yes” votes and 38 and 34 “no” votes. Twelve delegations’ votes were divided and did not count. C045 received 63 and 65 lay and clergy, respectively, “yes” votes, and 32 and 31 “no” votes. Again twelve votes were divided and did not count. Bishops voted 62 to 43 to give consent (2 did not vote).
The church has been ordaining homosexuals for nearly two thousand years. We all know gay priests and gay bishops – some are in the closet, most are out of the closet. We have had gay assistants at Trinity long before I came here over 8 yrs ago, we will have them again, I am sure, in the future. The priest who baptized me fifty-eight years ago, I learned a little while ago, was gay, and now he is a retired bishop living in Florida. One of the deans of my seminary had been the Bishop of Utah, and just before his retirement, he came out and announced that he was gay. The only difference in this present situation is that Gene Robinson was openly known to be a gay priest, and an extremely capable and well-loved one, for some 15 to 20 years, before the people of New Hampshire elected him as their bishop, fairly and legitimately, on the second ballot– an almost unheard of early election! It took the Diocese of New York a number of years ago 24 ballots to elect their new bishop, and that happened at about 1 a.m. in the morning! And yes, there are some bad gay priests and bishops, just as there are some bad heterosexual priests and bishops. To dispel a popular myth, gay people are not pedophiles; they are two very different things. In fact, most pedophiles are heterosexual men, and are usually relatives of their victims.
On almost every single controversial issue that exists in our society – be it capital punishment, abortion, the war in Iraq, gun control, you name it, – I guarantee that I can find a substantial number of people in this parish on both sides of the issue – some for it, some against it. And yet, we don’t go around taking votes on all these issues, or on any of them. The beauty of the Episcopal Church is that we can agree to disagree, and we’ve been doing that for 214 years. There is a reason that we are called the via media, the name of our diocesan newspaper, the “middle way,” because we have room for all people under our roof. We are inclusive. There is nothing that says that, like some denominations, we have to be homogeneous in our thinking on all issues. We are a church for people who like to use their intellects, and not blindly turn off their minds and think what someone else tells them to think, and that means being on different sides of the same issue. My job is to minister to people on both sides of an issue, and not try to create division in our parish. We need to be united as the body of Christ in this world in order to carry out the work of the gospel. And there are far more important things we need to be doing other than wasting our time discussing what for all intents and purposes is a non-event. Our unity transcends the petty issues that divide secular society.
I remember back in the sixties, when I attended Trinity Church, Princeton, during my college years, the rector, Bob Spears, later to become the Bishop of Rochester, took part in the Civil Rights march in Selma, Alabama. The following Sunday, when he preached about his experiences during that march, people in the congregation got up and walked the center aisle and out the door. Today, we can’t believe that people reacted to Civil Rights in this way in New Jersey! But times change, and so does the church because it is a living, breathing, human organization. The church over the years has changed its thinking about British rule of the colonies after the Revolution (most clergy were Anglican sympathizers), slavery, divorce, civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the ordination of women, to name a few.
As I said earlier, the Episcopal Church has room for everyone. It is alive and well, and yes, there is a little bit more than the usual negativity thanks to the media hype from last month’s convention. We are inclusive, because we tolerate those who differ from us in many different aspects of our human condition, sexuality being one of them. We have parishes that still use the 1928 Prayer Book, we have Anglo-Catholic parishes (those with “smells, bells, and yells”), we have charismatic and renewal parishes, we have black and Hispanic and other ethnic parishes, we have Morning Prayer parishes, we have fundamentalist parishes, we have those who refuse to recognize the ordination of women, we have inner city, suburban, and rural parishes, large and small, rich and poor. You name it, we have it! By the way, we even have chapters of an Episcopal Gay organization called Integrity in every diocese in this country, and have for as long as I have been ordained. I even had a chapter of Integrity that met monthly in my parish in White Plains.
I have heard some people say recently that time is of the utmost importance; we have to act now on this issue. That is utter nonsense! As our People’s Warden, Bruce Lovejoy, reminded us at our last Vestry meeting, we have been debating the issue of the ordination of women for the past twenty-seven years, and there are still bishops and dioceses in this country – but fortunately only a handful, – that do not ordain women. Last month’s General Convention finally said, enough is enough! We are not going to continue further study on this issue. What, then, leads anybody to believe that the issue of sexual identification is going to be resolved in a month, a year, or even twenty-seven more years? The issue, and those discussing both sides of it, will be around for a long, long, time to come.
Twenty-seven years ago at the General Convention of 1976, which also, by the way, was held in Minneapolis and which I attended in person, when both the new Prayer Book and the ordination of women were voted on, the same dissident voices were heard then, as now, saying, “The Church will fall apart,” “This is contrary to God’s will and biblical truth,” “The rest of the Anglican Communion will disown us, Rome will hate us, ecumenism will suffer.” First of all, none of these “cry wolf” predictions happened. All other denominations are facing the same issues, and it just happened that the Episcopal Church faced it first, and for that reason I am glad it did, and proud to be an Episcopalian– we take the lead, the initiative, and we don’t sit back and take things passively on the sidelines. The Roman Church has never really liked us anyway, and to this day they still don’t recognize the weddings we perform. As I told you a few weeks ago, I recently had to send a Roman Catholic groom over to Monsignor McGovern so that he could fill out the necessary paperwork to have his marriage to an Episcopalian and in an Episcopal Church recognized by the Roman Church. Sure, some parishes and parishioners will leave now, as they did 27 years ago, and that is very sad. But parishes have always done that. Back in the 1890s a group of people left to form the Reformed Episcopal Church, because they thought that the Episcopal Church was becoming too loose and they objected to the new 1898 Prayer Book. Incidentally, there is a Reformed Episcopal Church in Mt. Laurel, with whom we are not in communion, and recently the man who calls himself the rector there wrote a letter to the Burlington County Times inviting all dissatisfied Episcopalians to join his church!
At this point I want to say a few words about the Bible. The Bible is a written record of different people’s experience of God. People through the centuries have experienced God in many, often contradictory, ways, and biblical writings reflect this. Many different versions or translations of the Bible exist. Each reflects the limited scientific knowledge, personal beliefs of its translators, and social beliefs of the time period in which it was translated. If the Bible consists of inspired writings, or God’s revelation to humankind about his ways, why do we think that God’s revelation to us necessarily ended when the New Testament canon was closed in 382 A.D. There are many “inspired” writings that were not included in either testament, simply because they were not available at the precise time when the two collections of writings were codified. Our Apocrypha, from which we read this morning, is a good example of writings that were left out or omitted from the Old and New Testaments and there are many others as well. To say that God has revealed nothing new to us in 2000 years is the same as saying that the Holy Spirit died in the 1st century. God may be leading us to new insights and new revelations today, and we hope he is, therefore we cannot lived with closed minds.
The two most widely-used verses to condemn homosexuality are Lev. 18:22 and 20:13. They come from the Holiness Code of Leviticus, which was written primarily as a ritual manual for Israel’s priests. Christians today are not bound by the rules and rituals described in Leviticus (see Gal. 3:22-25). If people insist on using these passages, then they are also bound by the other rules and rituals found in Leviticus. Leviticus prohibits: 1. tattoos, 2. wearing certain types of jewelry, 3. eating certain kinds of meat, 4. sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual cycle, 5. wearing clothing made from blended textiles (cotton-polyester blends), 6. cross-breeding livestock, 7. sowing a field with mixed seed, 8. men cutting their hair or shaving their beards, and 9. eating or touching the dead flesh of pigs, rabbits, and some forms of seafood. The Holiness Code also endorses polygamy and requires Saturday to be reserved as the Sabbath. In the New Testament, if you follow Paul’s teachings (Romans, 1 Cor., and 1 Timothy), you must also accept his view that women should sit in the back of the church and keep their mouths closed, and other such ridiculous practices. Read Fr. Salmon’s sermon of August 24th, which deals with this whole subject. Paul’s writings have also been twisted to punish and oppress every identifiable minority in the world: Jews, children, women, blacks, slaves, politicians, divorced people, the mentally ill, and religious reformers, and the list could go on. The word found in 1 Cor. and 1 Timothy, malakee, literally means “one who lacks discipline or who is morally weak,” and is never used in reference to sexuality or gender. It was only in 1946, when the Revised Standard Translation of the Bible was made, that its translators gave the word a sexual connotation by translating it to mean “sexual pervert.” The word arsenokeeteh, used in 1 Cor. and 1 Timothy, means “male-active-bed,” and is a reference to male cult prostitution that was prevalent in Greco-Roman times, and which, of course, Paul rightly condemned. Of the six passages commonly used to condemn homosexuality, three are incorrectly translated, and three are taken out of context of condemning idolatrous religious practices. The Ten Commandments say nothing about homosexuality, and Jesus never mentioned it.
In Hebrew and Greek there is no word for homosexuality. The word literally refers to persons who have sex with others of the same gender (from Greek homo, and Latin sexualis). Webster claims that the word “homosexual” was first used as an adjective in 1892 and as a noun in 1902, and “homophobia” in 1969 and “homophobe” in 1975. The translation of any Bible word as homosexual is a mistake. The Bible also has no word in Hebrew or Greek that is the same as our word “sex.” The word “flesh” means “human,” and never means “sex.” Details of sexual practices were never given in the Old or New Testament. The only term that conveys the idea of having sex is the Hebrew term “to lie with.” Marriage in the Bible was not based on romantic love, but on a legal contract usually entered into by parents on behalf of their children. The average age for marriage in the time of Jesus was 14 for girls and 16 for boys. Average life expectancy was only 25 years. The Old Testament does not include a belief in “heaven” or a future time of reward and continued life. The only way a man could live on after his death was through his children, his “seed.” No man was allowed to remain unmarried. Old Testament Hebrew does not have a word for bachelor. The Greek word for romantic love, eros, is never used in the New Testament, though it was the most common word for love in the Greek-speaking world. To read bits and pieces of biblical material into present day culture is to misrepresent the Bible and to distort its message of God’s love in Christ for all people in today’s world.
Finally, a word about Resolution C051. Resolution C051 recognizes that parishes have been using same-sex blessing liturgies for many years. Ten years ago when I was in New York, the Bishop said to the clergy, “ I know that you are using same-sex blessings, I just don’t want to know about them.” This is nothing new. There are a lot of things we do for which we don’t have liturgies or prayers. There is no official, authorized service for the Blessing of the Animals service which we do here every year, or for the Death of a Pet, but we do them just the same. There are no prayers for blessing the shrimp fleet in the Gulf of Mexico, or the hounds on Thanksgiving Day in Virginia. Marriage is a legal contract sanctioned by the state. At this point only two states permit marriages between people of the same sex, so what we are talking about here is only a blessing, not a marriage. Jesus only attended a wedding in Cana of Galilee and performed a miracle there, he did not institute the state of marriage or perform one. When weddings are performed here, I pronounce a couple “husband and wife,” on behalf of the state of New Jersey and I sign their wedding license. The couple actually marries each other, and I simply pronounce that they are husband and wife – that’s the theology behind the ceremony – and then at the end of service, we walk up to the altar rail, where I ask God’s blessing on their relationship. If I can ask God’s blessing on animals, boats, houses, fire trucks, and jewelry, what is so wrong with asking God to bless a committed, monogamous, loving relationship between two people of any sex? And lastly, just to satisfy your curiosity, I have never been asked to perform a same-sex blessing in 33 years, so it is not as if people were beating a path to my door to have one performed.
Thank you for listening. Now, let’s open up the floor for some discussion.
Remarks made by
The Reverend Philip W. Stowell
Adult Education Class
September 21, 2003
On the sheet that I have just passed out (from The Living Church), you will find a list of some of the accomplishments of the 74th General Convention of our church, which met in Minneapolis last month. General Convention meets every three years and is composed of 4 clergy and 4 lay persons from every Diocese (of which there are 116) in the country meeting as the House of Deputies. These deputies are elected by their respective diocesan conventions the preceding year. There are also 107 bishops meeting as the House of Bishops, who are bishops for life. Delegates vote by dioceses and are elected to vote their consciences. They are not bound to vote in any particular way on any given issue; the same is true for bishops. The two most newsworthy resolutions about which most of us have heard through the media are Resolution C051 and Resolution C045. Resolution C051 has no binding effect on anyone; it just recognized a given fact of life within the church. Resolution C045 was a procedural matter giving consent to the people of the Diocese of New Hampshire to allow the consecration of their new bishop to take place. This happens after anyone is elected a bishop, but if the election occurs within 90 days of the General Convention, the vote is taken at convention, otherwise bishops and diocesan standing committees are individually polled, which usually takes a bit longer. C051 received 58 and 62 lay and clergy, respectively, “yes” votes and 38 and 34 “no” votes. Twelve delegations’ votes were divided and did not count. C045 received 63 and 65 lay and clergy, respectively, “yes” votes, and 32 and 31 “no” votes. Again twelve votes were divided and did not count. Bishops voted 62 to 43 to give consent (2 did not vote).
The church has been ordaining homosexuals for nearly two thousand years. We all know gay priests and gay bishops – some are in the closet, most are out of the closet. We have had gay assistants at Trinity long before I came here over 8 yrs ago, we will have them again, I am sure, in the future. The priest who baptized me fifty-eight years ago, I learned a little while ago, was gay, and now he is a retired bishop living in Florida. One of the deans of my seminary had been the Bishop of Utah, and just before his retirement, he came out and announced that he was gay. The only difference in this present situation is that Gene Robinson was openly known to be a gay priest, and an extremely capable and well-loved one, for some 15 to 20 years, before the people of New Hampshire elected him as their bishop, fairly and legitimately, on the second ballot– an almost unheard of early election! It took the Diocese of New York a number of years ago 24 ballots to elect their new bishop, and that happened at about 1 a.m. in the morning! And yes, there are some bad gay priests and bishops, just as there are some bad heterosexual priests and bishops. To dispel a popular myth, gay people are not pedophiles; they are two very different things. In fact, most pedophiles are heterosexual men, and are usually relatives of their victims.
On almost every single controversial issue that exists in our society – be it capital punishment, abortion, the war in Iraq, gun control, you name it, – I guarantee that I can find a substantial number of people in this parish on both sides of the issue – some for it, some against it. And yet, we don’t go around taking votes on all these issues, or on any of them. The beauty of the Episcopal Church is that we can agree to disagree, and we’ve been doing that for 214 years. There is a reason that we are called the via media, the name of our diocesan newspaper, the “middle way,” because we have room for all people under our roof. We are inclusive. There is nothing that says that, like some denominations, we have to be homogeneous in our thinking on all issues. We are a church for people who like to use their intellects, and not blindly turn off their minds and think what someone else tells them to think, and that means being on different sides of the same issue. My job is to minister to people on both sides of an issue, and not try to create division in our parish. We need to be united as the body of Christ in this world in order to carry out the work of the gospel. And there are far more important things we need to be doing other than wasting our time discussing what for all intents and purposes is a non-event. Our unity transcends the petty issues that divide secular society.
I remember back in the sixties, when I attended Trinity Church, Princeton, during my college years, the rector, Bob Spears, later to become the Bishop of Rochester, took part in the Civil Rights march in Selma, Alabama. The following Sunday, when he preached about his experiences during that march, people in the congregation got up and walked the center aisle and out the door. Today, we can’t believe that people reacted to Civil Rights in this way in New Jersey! But times change, and so does the church because it is a living, breathing, human organization. The church over the years has changed its thinking about British rule of the colonies after the Revolution (most clergy were Anglican sympathizers), slavery, divorce, civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the ordination of women, to name a few.
As I said earlier, the Episcopal Church has room for everyone. It is alive and well, and yes, there is a little bit more than the usual negativity thanks to the media hype from last month’s convention. We are inclusive, because we tolerate those who differ from us in many different aspects of our human condition, sexuality being one of them. We have parishes that still use the 1928 Prayer Book, we have Anglo-Catholic parishes (those with “smells, bells, and yells”), we have charismatic and renewal parishes, we have black and Hispanic and other ethnic parishes, we have Morning Prayer parishes, we have fundamentalist parishes, we have those who refuse to recognize the ordination of women, we have inner city, suburban, and rural parishes, large and small, rich and poor. You name it, we have it! By the way, we even have chapters of an Episcopal Gay organization called Integrity in every diocese in this country, and have for as long as I have been ordained. I even had a chapter of Integrity that met monthly in my parish in White Plains.
I have heard some people say recently that time is of the utmost importance; we have to act now on this issue. That is utter nonsense! As our People’s Warden, Bruce Lovejoy, reminded us at our last Vestry meeting, we have been debating the issue of the ordination of women for the past twenty-seven years, and there are still bishops and dioceses in this country – but fortunately only a handful, – that do not ordain women. Last month’s General Convention finally said, enough is enough! We are not going to continue further study on this issue. What, then, leads anybody to believe that the issue of sexual identification is going to be resolved in a month, a year, or even twenty-seven more years? The issue, and those discussing both sides of it, will be around for a long, long, time to come.
Twenty-seven years ago at the General Convention of 1976, which also, by the way, was held in Minneapolis and which I attended in person, when both the new Prayer Book and the ordination of women were voted on, the same dissident voices were heard then, as now, saying, “The Church will fall apart,” “This is contrary to God’s will and biblical truth,” “The rest of the Anglican Communion will disown us, Rome will hate us, ecumenism will suffer.” First of all, none of these “cry wolf” predictions happened. All other denominations are facing the same issues, and it just happened that the Episcopal Church faced it first, and for that reason I am glad it did, and proud to be an Episcopalian– we take the lead, the initiative, and we don’t sit back and take things passively on the sidelines. The Roman Church has never really liked us anyway, and to this day they still don’t recognize the weddings we perform. As I told you a few weeks ago, I recently had to send a Roman Catholic groom over to Monsignor McGovern so that he could fill out the necessary paperwork to have his marriage to an Episcopalian and in an Episcopal Church recognized by the Roman Church. Sure, some parishes and parishioners will leave now, as they did 27 years ago, and that is very sad. But parishes have always done that. Back in the 1890s a group of people left to form the Reformed Episcopal Church, because they thought that the Episcopal Church was becoming too loose and they objected to the new 1898 Prayer Book. Incidentally, there is a Reformed Episcopal Church in Mt. Laurel, with whom we are not in communion, and recently the man who calls himself the rector there wrote a letter to the Burlington County Times inviting all dissatisfied Episcopalians to join his church!
At this point I want to say a few words about the Bible. The Bible is a written record of different people’s experience of God. People through the centuries have experienced God in many, often contradictory, ways, and biblical writings reflect this. Many different versions or translations of the Bible exist. Each reflects the limited scientific knowledge, personal beliefs of its translators, and social beliefs of the time period in which it was translated. If the Bible consists of inspired writings, or God’s revelation to humankind about his ways, why do we think that God’s revelation to us necessarily ended when the New Testament canon was closed in 382 A.D. There are many “inspired” writings that were not included in either testament, simply because they were not available at the precise time when the two collections of writings were codified. Our Apocrypha, from which we read this morning, is a good example of writings that were left out or omitted from the Old and New Testaments and there are many others as well. To say that God has revealed nothing new to us in 2000 years is the same as saying that the Holy Spirit died in the 1st century. God may be leading us to new insights and new revelations today, and we hope he is, therefore we cannot lived with closed minds.
The two most widely-used verses to condemn homosexuality are Lev. 18:22 and 20:13. They come from the Holiness Code of Leviticus, which was written primarily as a ritual manual for Israel’s priests. Christians today are not bound by the rules and rituals described in Leviticus (see Gal. 3:22-25). If people insist on using these passages, then they are also bound by the other rules and rituals found in Leviticus. Leviticus prohibits: 1. tattoos, 2. wearing certain types of jewelry, 3. eating certain kinds of meat, 4. sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual cycle, 5. wearing clothing made from blended textiles (cotton-polyester blends), 6. cross-breeding livestock, 7. sowing a field with mixed seed, 8. men cutting their hair or shaving their beards, and 9. eating or touching the dead flesh of pigs, rabbits, and some forms of seafood. The Holiness Code also endorses polygamy and requires Saturday to be reserved as the Sabbath. In the New Testament, if you follow Paul’s teachings (Romans, 1 Cor., and 1 Timothy), you must also accept his view that women should sit in the back of the church and keep their mouths closed, and other such ridiculous practices. Read Fr. Salmon’s sermon of August 24th, which deals with this whole subject. Paul’s writings have also been twisted to punish and oppress every identifiable minority in the world: Jews, children, women, blacks, slaves, politicians, divorced people, the mentally ill, and religious reformers, and the list could go on. The word found in 1 Cor. and 1 Timothy, malakee, literally means “one who lacks discipline or who is morally weak,” and is never used in reference to sexuality or gender. It was only in 1946, when the Revised Standard Translation of the Bible was made, that its translators gave the word a sexual connotation by translating it to mean “sexual pervert.” The word arsenokeeteh, used in 1 Cor. and 1 Timothy, means “male-active-bed,” and is a reference to male cult prostitution that was prevalent in Greco-Roman times, and which, of course, Paul rightly condemned. Of the six passages commonly used to condemn homosexuality, three are incorrectly translated, and three are taken out of context of condemning idolatrous religious practices. The Ten Commandments say nothing about homosexuality, and Jesus never mentioned it.
In Hebrew and Greek there is no word for homosexuality. The word literally refers to persons who have sex with others of the same gender (from Greek homo, and Latin sexualis). Webster claims that the word “homosexual” was first used as an adjective in 1892 and as a noun in 1902, and “homophobia” in 1969 and “homophobe” in 1975. The translation of any Bible word as homosexual is a mistake. The Bible also has no word in Hebrew or Greek that is the same as our word “sex.” The word “flesh” means “human,” and never means “sex.” Details of sexual practices were never given in the Old or New Testament. The only term that conveys the idea of having sex is the Hebrew term “to lie with.” Marriage in the Bible was not based on romantic love, but on a legal contract usually entered into by parents on behalf of their children. The average age for marriage in the time of Jesus was 14 for girls and 16 for boys. Average life expectancy was only 25 years. The Old Testament does not include a belief in “heaven” or a future time of reward and continued life. The only way a man could live on after his death was through his children, his “seed.” No man was allowed to remain unmarried. Old Testament Hebrew does not have a word for bachelor. The Greek word for romantic love, eros, is never used in the New Testament, though it was the most common word for love in the Greek-speaking world. To read bits and pieces of biblical material into present day culture is to misrepresent the Bible and to distort its message of God’s love in Christ for all people in today’s world.
Finally, a word about Resolution C051. Resolution C051 recognizes that parishes have been using same-sex blessing liturgies for many years. Ten years ago when I was in New York, the Bishop said to the clergy, “ I know that you are using same-sex blessings, I just don’t want to know about them.” This is nothing new. There are a lot of things we do for which we don’t have liturgies or prayers. There is no official, authorized service for the Blessing of the Animals service which we do here every year, or for the Death of a Pet, but we do them just the same. There are no prayers for blessing the shrimp fleet in the Gulf of Mexico, or the hounds on Thanksgiving Day in Virginia. Marriage is a legal contract sanctioned by the state. At this point only two states permit marriages between people of the same sex, so what we are talking about here is only a blessing, not a marriage. Jesus only attended a wedding in Cana of Galilee and performed a miracle there, he did not institute the state of marriage or perform one. When weddings are performed here, I pronounce a couple “husband and wife,” on behalf of the state of New Jersey and I sign their wedding license. The couple actually marries each other, and I simply pronounce that they are husband and wife – that’s the theology behind the ceremony – and then at the end of service, we walk up to the altar rail, where I ask God’s blessing on their relationship. If I can ask God’s blessing on animals, boats, houses, fire trucks, and jewelry, what is so wrong with asking God to bless a committed, monogamous, loving relationship between two people of any sex? And lastly, just to satisfy your curiosity, I have never been asked to perform a same-sex blessing in 33 years, so it is not as if people were beating a path to my door to have one performed.
Thank you for listening. Now, let’s open up the floor for some discussion.
