At the trial of Bishop Righter one of the arguments made by his lawyers in his defense, as well as in defense of the appropriateness of homosexual partnerships, was this:

Acceptance of divorce leads to acceptance of homosexuality.

Most heterosexual persons today look for personal satisfaction and fulfillment in marriage. Procreation is often or usually seen as a possible option at best. Thus if that self-fulfillment is not found in a first marriage then a person feels free to end it and enter a second one in search of that satisfaction. Likewise what homosexual persons look for and deserve in their faithful partnerships is self-fulfillment and personal satisfaction.

I had heard this kind of apology for the morality of homosexual partnerships before the Righter trial and I have heard it since. In fact it is common now to observe that those who look to the Bible for support for either divorce and remarriage or for homosexual partnerships actually use the same kind of reasoning in terms of their interpretation of biblical texts and themes. They seek to show that what the Church has believed and taught and confessed from the Bible has been based on poor exegesis and interpretation - thus faulty, and that they, with the modern tools of scientific exegesis, can see what the Church has not seen in its long engagement with the sacred texts.

Recently I came across an attractively written plea written by an Evangelical Protestant for the full incorporation of both the divorced and remarried and homosexual partners in the Church. This professor, whom I first met years ago at Fuller Theological Seminary when I was a visiting speaker there, is Lewis Smedes, author of many books used in reformed and evangelical seminaries, colleges and churches. He is charming and affable gentleman and an ordained minister of the Christian Reformed Church.

He is emphatic that "the wideness of God's mercy is like the wideness of the sea" and thus there is room in the Church for those who were partially or full excluded by former generations on sexual immorality grounds.

In his article, "Like the Wideness of the Sea" in "Perspectives," for May 1999 he faces the question: "Does the church's dramatic move from the exclusion to the embrace of divorced and remarried persons [from the 1960's] provide a precedent for an embrace of homosexual persons who live together in a committed partnership?" At the end of the article his conclusion is in the affirmative. The one act of mercy should lead to the further act of mercy.

After citing various evidence from church life and the Bible he asks, "Are the two situations [divorced/remarriage & homosexual partners] significantly and relevantly similar to each other?" He thinks they are and offers five ways of similarity.

1. Both divorced/remarried partners and homosexual partners are seeking to fulfill a fundamental, God-implanted human need for a shared life of intimate, committed, and exclusive love with one other human being.
2. Both are fulfilling their God-given human need in the only way available to them, albeit not what the Creator originally intended for his children.
3. Both are striving to do the one thing the Lord considered supremely important about all sexual relationships: THEY ARE LIVING THEIR SEXUAL LIVES WITHIN THEIR COVENANTS WITH EACH OTHER.
4. Both are trying to create the best lives they can within the limits of personal conditions they cannot change.
5. Both want to live as followers of Christ within the supportive embrace of the Church.

God's ideal is for a permanent union of a man and a woman in matrimony. However, this is impossible for many people. Therefore there are in our society second bests which are still good.

We all know that there is a divorce culture and most of us are involved directly or indirectly in it (Which family has no divorced person in it these days?). Divorced persons desire union and fulfillment with another person and this we grant via second and even third marriages in church (Bishop Righter has three wives alive). Further, there are homosexual persons who cannot change who they are and they also desire loving partners. This we ought to grant.

God is exceedingly merciful. Experience has shown us from the 1960's that God can forgive and restore those who break their original covenant of matrimony and enter into a new one. Building on this we ought to see that the mercy of God is wide enough to embrace homosexual persons who live in covenant and who desire to be full church members. And if we carefully read the Bible, even a chapter like Romans 1, we shall see that faithful same-sex partnerships are not condemned.

To conclude:

Personally speaking, I cannot see how a church can finally resist the full inclusion and blessing of homosexual couples if it has embraced the divorce culture and justifies the same to some degree or another in canon law and in practice. The ECUSA provides an excellent and thus tragic example of this phenomenon of acceptance and justification. The few Episcopalians who justify the divorce culture and at the same time condemn their church blessing homosexual partnerships will soon come to see that their position is untenable and illogical in the modern experientialist ethos of modern morality and biblical study.

Before the homosexual lobby can be graciously and firmly answered, a church has to have in place a high doctrine and practice of marriage wherein procreation and family life are seen as of primary importance in the will of God, and wherein the husband and wife are seen as an icon of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church his Bride. At the same time such a church will need to be involved in practical ministry of care and mercy to those who are bruised by the divorce and lesgay cultures. And it will most certainly have to make sure that its clergy, the ministers of mercy, are icons of chastity whether married or celibate. We have strayed so far that it will take a long and painful journey to return to the confession and practice of true sexual morality.