Bishop Gene Robinson announced the end of his marriage to Mark Andrew in an email sent to the Diocese of New Hampshire. The couple were joined in a civil union in 2008, and the marriage was legalized in 2010.
By Ryan Hunter, Juicy Ecumenism, the Institute on Religion and Democracy’s blog
I do not gloat over retired Episcopalian Bishop V. Gene Robinson’s announcement, nor I hope will any of us. Having endured and witnessed my own family’s trials and sufferings amidst divorce, I recognize that it is utterly impossible, and inhuman, to rejoice whenever two people come to a parting, whether it involves the end of a marriage or otherwise. I cannot condone the relationship Bishop Robinson was in, but my heart is not made of stone, and, so, naturally, I cannot help but feel pity for the sense of loss he and his former legal partner Mark Andrew naturally feel. Yet the sad reality is that retired Bishop Robinson’s kind of thinking about what marriage is exemplifies the perfect embodiment of the desacralization of society and of the world itself within the progressive worldview. This worldview does not entail merely the creation of a hitherto unrecognized form of marriage, but the desacralization of the very concept or idea itself into something that hardly resembles a marriage.