More details emerge about allegations against bishop candidate
The Layman Online, August 5, 2003
More details were beginning to emerge Tuesday a day after Episcopalians voted to delay a vote on whether the Rev. Gene Robinson would become the denomination’s first openly gay bishop.
A day earlier, CNN reported that the 74th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, meeting in Minneapolis, was rocked by allegations by a Vermont man accusing Robinson of fondling him “a couple of years ago.” Church officials said another “allegation contends that a Web site Robinson founded several years ago that counsels gay and lesbian youths contains a link to a Web site with erotic photographs.”
On Tuesday, CNN reported that Robinson had said “he has had no connection to the Web site for several years and was not aware of any link it might have had to any such outside site.”
Both allegations are under investigation.
Jim Solheim, a spokesman for the church, told the Episcopal News Service that he “did not know how long the investigation would take or if a vote on Robinson would take place before the church’s national meeting ends Friday. Bishop Gordon Scruton of the Diocese of Western Massachusetts was named to lead the investigation.
Solheim said accusations such as these “trigger an almost automatic” inquiry.
Church officials told Fox News, the Episcopal News Service and MSNBC that the investigation also would include “scrutiny of separate concerns raised about Robinson’s relationship to a Web site of Outright, a secular outreach program for gay and bisexual youth that Robinson helped found.”
The organization has multiple chapters in northern New England, and Outright officials said Robinson helped found the Concord chapter. The allegation about a link to pornography concerned the Concord group’s Web site, church officials said.
Mo Baxley, a member of Concord chapter’s board of directors, told the Episcopal News Service that Robinson hasn’t been involved with the group for several years and had no role in developing its Web page.
The link, which was removed from the Web site, is on an unaffiliated site that had resources for gay youth, Baxley said. That page provided resources for bisexuals that, a few links away, provided access to porn.
Outright issued a statement saying the organization was not aware of the link and objected to it. A later check of the Web sites for the group’s New Hampshire chapter found no such links.
Cathy Kidman, interim director of the Portland, Me., chapter of Outright, told MSNBC that they had removed a link from their site to another site that had a link to an adult-content Web site. Thanking the media for alerting them to the situation, Kidman said, “We do not believe the link in question is appropriate on our Web site for the population we serve.”
Kidman stressed that Robinson was not involved “at any time” in the Portland chapter or its Web site.
In a separate statement, Mim Eastron, executive director of the parent organization – Seacoast Outright – told the Episcopal News Service that Robinson, to the best of their knowledge, had not been involved with the Concord chapter organization for some time. Robinson had helped found the Concord branch, Eastron said, but has not been active for a number of years.
Eastron confirmed that a link to an adult-content Web site had been discovered on the Concord chapter’s site and had been removed. “The adult site is not something that we consider appropriate for any youth,” she said.