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The new bishop is straight
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Issue
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| Contributor | Homegrown Democrat |
| Last Edited | Homegrown Democrat May 23, 2012 07:13am |
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| Category | General |
| Author | Felice Belman |
| Media | Newspaper - Concord Monitor |
| News Date | Wednesday, May 23, 2012 12:50:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | I took a couple calls from readers this morning who were fairly exasperated by the opening sentence of Molly A.K. Connors’s report on the front page of the Sunday Monitor about the next Episcopal bishop for New Hampshire. It said: “New Hampshire’s Episcopalians yesterday elected a 50-year-old, straight, father of three to be the next bishop of the state diocese.” You can read the full story here.
Who cares if the new bishop is straight or gay, my callers wanted to know. Why is his sexual preference pertinent? One caller accused the Monitor of being obsessed with issues of sexuality. A commenter on the Monitor website wrote, “Of course that’s exactly how the media and many in the general public treat gays and lesbians, so maybe Ms. Connors was just trying to treat everybody the same.”
My hunch is that Robert Hirschfeld never set out to be New Hampshire’s straight bishop. But because he will be the successor to Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, that detail seemed important.
Robinson’s tenure as bishop has been both historic and stressful – for him as well as his diocese. As the first gay bishop, he was the recipient of death threats. Some congregations were so offended by the notion of a gay bishop that they broke away from the Episcopal Church altogether. In 2008 Robinson was deliberately not invited to the once-a-decade meeting of Anglican bishops in England. And the New Hampshire church was subject to worldwide attention that never let up. |
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