It has long been thought, and expressed, that homosexuality (and lesbianism) is at the heart of the Episcopal Church's changing sexual mores and attitudes demanding acceptance by church leaders.Revelations, this past week that the late Bishop of New York, Paul Moore, engaged in an extensive homosexual affair while married, raises the specter that it is not homosexuality in the Episcopal Church, but numerous pansexual behaviors - behaviors that are causing rifts in the wider Anglican Communion.
Moore was married with nine children. All the while he carried on a homosexual relationship, for a number of years, with a man by the name of Andrew Verver, whom he met on a trip to the island of Patmos. "I was his sexual life," Verver told Honor Moore, Paul Moore's daughter, in a new book about his life that will shortly hit the bookstands. In a discussion with Honor Moore, Verver said, "Of course, there were other men."
A woman, who knew Moore, wrote VOL to say that even in the 1970's people knew about Moore's sexual proclivities and substance abuse. He was later asked not to function as a cleric by Bishop Richard Grein because he was caught in bed with someone, not his wife. He only reappeared for Sisk's consecration, she wrote. This was further confirmed in an article in the New York Times.
It was known by many that Moore committed adultery, but never exposed. An orthodox Episcopal bishop, who was a priest in New York at that time, told VOL that Moore's libidinous sexual activities were well -known but no one dared to challenge him. At one point in his climb up the ladder, Moore made the cover of TIME magazine. Moore, who died in 2003 was known as a limousine liberal. While the patrician bishop said he felt the pain of poor and disenfranchised women, he felt it without affecting his own lavish lifestyle...
Bi-sexuality is the new frontier, now that homosexuality in the church has been "conquered". Once you move from the biblical standard on human sexual behavior, there is no limit. It is no surprise then that IsabeI Carter Hayward, a self-described socialist, feminist, lesbian, "womanist" theologian, and a professor of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School and perhaps the best known member of the church's growing feminist- liberation theology movement should endorse sado-masochism. Heyward's theology extends to calling The Trinity, a homophilial/homoerotic image of relations between male (father / son)." Heyward rejected the divinity of Christ out of hand. She said, "I have been led to Sophia / wisdom, to Christa / community, to Hagar the slave woman, to Jephthah's daughter," all post Christian goddesses now popular among certain feminist theologians...
Read the rest of David Virtue's essay here.
