The Roman Catholic Church is still reeling from the shock that some of their priests indulged in the sexual abuse of children and has taken steps to rectify the problem within the church. Now, the Episcopal Church has installed an openly gay priest as a Bishop. That is significant in ways not evident to some in society. He practiced adultery, left his wife and children for a man and has lived in a state of adultery for the past 13 years with this man. In normative historical Christian teaching adultery is wrong as is fornication. I do not think that many of us favor making fornication or adultery against civil law in the United States. Let me be plain, my writing this is not about civil law. This new Bishop violated the teachings of the Bible and his denomination's canon law. He violated his personal vows to his wife and his obligation to his children as a father in the eyes of the Bible. He betrayed the trust of his wife and abandoned her. I know that this has become a practice widely accepted in society as common, whether or not anyone thinks it is good or not. He is actively encouraging the establishment of gay outreach groups to capture child recruits into the gay lifestyle. The new view is that there are many children that are pubescent who are homosexuals and they need their help during their formative years. In the past few years there has been a push to lower the age of consent in some European countries, coincident with the push for other aspects of the culture of death becoming entrenched there as it is here. Departure from the teachings of the Bible and the rejection of the Bible as having weight in matters of faith and morals as the Bishop has was applauded by many in the Episcopal Church. This is not particularly new to some extent among the more progressive members such as bishops Spong or Pike. These two more well-known mavericks reasoned that the Bible is not the final arbiter for faith or morals and acted accordingly.
Someone may say that we have all done things that are wrong or sinful, and this is true, but it is not an excuse to plunge into approving sin as a way of dealing with it. The rate of sinning against God and our fellow man is a continuum with minor to major infractions of Biblical commandments and principles having been incurred. The new Bishop begs the question of where does one draw the line, or better yet where does one move the line to as the Bible is taken less seriously among communicants in churches? The Episcopal Church now will bless same sex unions, this on the heels of a national issue of civil unions of gays being afforded legal sanction. If you hold to the Bible as having significance, the argument has different meaning than to someone who sees it as antithetical to their particular lifestyle. Somewhere in all of this our definition of what constitutes being loving and giving versus selfish and self-serving is being changed. Many people who have given up on the church as effectual or having meaning to them personally have done so because their experience in churches have not been good. On a more elemental level, women and children have been treated shabbily to abusively in homes on a regular basis by husbands and fathers who also went to church every Sunday. Taking Biblical admonitions as an excuse to practice gross sin against their wives is a place where the rent in the cloth of the sanctity of marriage began. Men have excused certain behaviors as a right seemingly sanctioned by scripture. Really it amounted to male domination as a foregone conclusion and society's tacit agreement that this is so, no matter how poorly a woman might be treated as a wife. Society has not seen spousal abuse as significant enough to reflect protections in laws and their enforcement partly because it seemed a matter of privacy. Disputes that are domestic are poorly understood and men who get nabbed are out the next day in part because the wife or significant other recants her charges. It is not understood that abusers make their victims psychologically dependent upon them and by the time violence is practiced the victim is so imbued with loyalty that is not normative she will welcome the safety of the familiar even though it means more abuse in the future. The cycle of having a honeymoon where the abuse abates and the man says he is truly sorry is something that ends with such abatement periods less lengthy and the abuse escalates as the cycle of abuse begins anew.