If, the reporter asked, a divorced male bishop could live with a man to whom he was not married, what about a divorced heterosexual male bishop living with a female lover? “Or,” she added, “is being outside marriage only OK if you are gay?”
“The Episcopal Church honors holy matrimony,” Bishop Griswold said, “and certainly if a male were elected bishop and was living with a woman without benefit of clergy, that would be a significant problem.”
“So there’s a double standard, then?” Miss Griffith asked, at which point church spokesman Jim Solheim abruptly ended the press conference.
Smooth move, Jim, because there’s nothing else to say. Unless you expect Griswold to acknowledge the hypocrisy in the election of Robinson and that everybody’s favorite new bishop is a philanderer and a man who abandoned his family. But then why should hypocrisy unsettle them? It didn’t unsettle liberals when it was Bill Clinton who embodied the hypocrisy.
