Carved in granite

Because I’m an adopted New Hampshirite, people keep asking me what I think about the gay bishop. Once upon a time, the most famous symbol of Vermont manhood was the Old Man of the Mountain, the Great Stone Face, whose profile God and nature had etched onto the cliffs high above Franconia Notch in the White Mountains. But, after centuries of keeping a watchful eye on us, he came crashing down in an almighty rock slide a couple of months back. So now the most celebrated symbol of Granite State manhood is the Great Gay Face, the Rev. Gene Robinson. And, although I’m feeling a little gayed out these days, since folks insist on pressing me, let me say a couple of things about the Episcopal Church’s and the worldwide Anglican Communion’s first gay bishop.

And by gay, I don’t mean one of those fainthearted Church of England “celibate gays” like poor doomed Jeffrey John. Like Canon Robinson, Canon John was also in line for a bishopric, over in England, until the archbishop of Canterbury leaned on him. As I mentioned the other week, the notion of a celibate gay with a long-term partner had a vaguely Clintonian “but I didn’t inhale” whiff about it. By contrast, Canon Robinson, a proudly “practicing” gay, decided to shoot for the whole enchilada — daring the dithering nellies of his church to take not one small tentative first step but a giant leap for mankind. He had the courage of his concupiscence, and he has been rewarded for it.

True, he had to endure a slight delay while the bishops hastily investigated some last-minute complaints about inappropriate touching and links to pornographic Web sites. But those were soon dismissed, and the bishop was elected, and, as he pointed out, this wasn’t the first two-day dramatic turnaround the church has known. “God has once again brought an Easter out of Good Friday,” he declared.

Got that? If he’s not the Second Coming, he’s the next best thing. As The Washington Post’s Caryle Murphy reported on Thursday, “Yesterday’s gospel reading on the Transfiguration of Jesus was about the mysterious transformation of Christ that caused such fear and trembling, but also joy, in his believers. For the group attending the noontime Eucharist service at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, the reading could not have been more pertinent.” Yes, indeed. For, just like Christ, Mr. Robinson causes fear and trembling but also joy in his believers.

In an odd way, The Post is on to something. If the comparisons of the bishop of New Hampshire to Christ Himself strike you as a bit excessive, let me make a more modest one. As an old musical theater hand, I’ve been here before. It’s the difference between the Broadway of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Broadway of Stephen Sondheim. The former was the great central thruway of American popular culture, the latter is a shriveled little self-regarding gay ghetto. Don’t get me wrong, I love show tunes — and, as a result, I’m always assumed to be gay. I don’t particularly mind that — I bought some Judy Garland DVDs in New York the other week and the guy was all flirty with me, which girl sales clerks hardly ever are these days. But a lot of chaps aren’t so keen on that sort of thing, and eventually institutions reach a kind of gay tipping point after which straight men just steer clear. The Broadway of Stephen Sondheim may be, as its admirers claim, better, sharper, more sophisticated, but it’s also underattended.

So the peculiar obsession of the dying Anglican church in Britain, America and Canada with homosexuality is a kind of transformation. Having lost the masses, the church has found a niche demographic, and it’s desperately trying to repackage its old inventory. And, if in their need to endow their gay fetish with spiritual purpose, they sound a little loopy, bear with ’em. They’re still fumbling for the rationale. The bishop of Maryland, for example, made a painful attempt to square the awkward biblical strictures on homosexuality with Mr. Robinson’s vigorous sex life. His line is that God isn’t against gay sex per se, just gay sex practiced by heterosexual men. Really. “We might say about the Sodom passage,” he elaborated, “that it is not really about a group of gay men behaving badly, but a group of heterosexual men behaving atrociously.” Similarly, in Romans, Paul isn’t objecting to homosexual men having sex with each other, just heterosexual men having sex with each other.

Who knew? So God’s cool with practicing straights, He’s cool with practicing gays, it’s just bi-guys He’s got a problem with. Or have I misunderstood the bishop’s argument?

Needless to say, Mr. Robinson had no time for such pretzel logic. He cut to the chase. “I believe that God gave us the gift of sexuality so that we might express with our bodies the love that’s in our hearts,” he announced to his fellow bishops. “I just need to tell you that I experience that with my partner. In the time that we have, I can’t go into all the theology around it, but what I can tell you is that in my relationship with my partner, I am able to express the deep love that’s in my heart, and in his unfailing and unquestioning love of me, I experience just a little bit of the kind of never-ending, never-failing love that God has for me. So it’s sacramental for me.”

Mr. Robinson would seem to be comparing gay sex not with anything so footling as the sacrament of marriage but with the Anglican Church’s two “sacraments ordained of Christ” — that’s to say, baptism and the Lord’s supper, through which one experiences “God’s good will toward us” and “by which He doth work invisibly in us.” If Bishop Robinson feels God working invisibly in him during gay sex, good luck to him. In older times, he and his partner would have set up their own church founded on the principle thereof. But back then the Episcopal Church still understood itself to be part of the kingdom of God, not a federation of self-esteeming cantons where a sacrament is whatever turns you on.

And that seems to be what matters to Gene Robinson, a man who broke up his family because he put his sexual appetites before his daughters. I doff my hat to him. This week he got the church to endorse not just his gayness but his narcissism. Sacramental for him, but what’s in it for the church?

Mark Steyn is a senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain’s Telegraph Group and North American editor for the Spectator and is a nationally syndicated columnist.