In 1996 the Episcopal Church put one of its bishops on trial for heresy. The community of Episcopal bishops hadn’t convened a heresy trial since 1924. Bishop Walter Righter stood accused by some of his colleagues of transgressing the bounds of Episcopal doctrine by ordaining an avowedly homosexual person who was living openly with his male lover. Bishop Righter had ordained Barry Stopfel a deacon of the Episcopal Church on Saturday, September 30, 1990. A year later, Bishop John “Jack” Shelby Spong of Newark, New Jersey, ordained Barry Stopfel a priest of the Episcopal Church on September 14, 1991. During the ordination, Bishop Spong called Barry Stopfel “a unique symbol of the Church’s struggle.” He was all of that.
In a letter from Bishop Spong to Barry Stopfel, dated September 25, 1990, Spong defines the dynamic between their two personalities: “I am grateful to you for your willingness to be a symbol, first of the church’s homophobia and second, of the church’s hope. [Emphasis added] In other words, Stopfel was to become Jack Spong’s instrument, his creature. Spong imagines the Episcopal Church to be infected with something that gay propagandists, posing as pop psychologists, have labeled “homophobia.” Spong wants to play doctor. The visionary Doctor Spong wants to dazzle the homophobic masses with a model gay minister, a new, pristine uber-gay, someone who would lull their critical senses and make them forget every wrenching display of depravity to which they had been witness from every one of America’s numerous “gay pride” events.
Barry Stopfel was not Jack Spong’s first attempt to create a viable Frankengay. But Creature Number One, an openly-homosexual ordained priest named Robert Williams, had unexpectedly reverted to his true nature and begun ranting that celibates and saints ought to “get laid.” So it was back to the laboratory for an unhappy Doctor Spong. Then lightning struck and Barry Stopfel appeared from the darkness and Doctor Spong’s dream of presenting the world with the Perfect Gay Role Model was rekindled. Barry was all Spong could have hoped for: he seemed safely committed to his lover, Will Leckie, which would keep his name off the police blotter; when he opened his mouth nothing emerged but sound bites, euphemisms, pop-psych catch phrases, slogans and barbed ad hominem attacks aimed at “the homophobes”; and when he was confronted with challenging questions about the gay counter culture he would reflexively retreat from intellectual debate. In short, Barry was outwardly bland, intellectually vacant and consumed with a desire to be accepted, to be loved. His neediness poured off him like a flop sweat, it stains every page of his self-promoting book Courage to Love.
And so it was that Spong’s creature was made, not born. For years thereafter he would lurch about Saint George’s church kicking over traditions, twisting sacred texts, suffocating the expression of women’s spirituality, and scattering the faithful to far away congregations. Those who remained were condemned from the pulpit for flaws they did not have and for sins they had not committed. The small group who shared his turns of mind, his social agenda, was rewarded with positions of influence, all others were cast into the outer circle of Saint George’s society. Spong’s Frankengay could only abide True Believers. I witnessed all of this at close range. What follows is the true history you won’t find on the gay-empowerment websites.
At Stopfel’s second ordination, Jack Spong reminded the congregation that the General Convention in Phoenix had declined to prohibit the ordination of homosexuals and had declined to censure bishops who had confessed to ordaining homosexual persons. Spong reminded them that the General Convention had refused to amend its canons in ways that would have excluded the ordination of any baptized member of their Church. Their language was totally inclusive.
The heresy trial of Walter Righter cast media attention on the gay priest Barry Stopfel and his ministry in Maplewood, New Jersey. In the wake of this media maelstrom Barry Stopfel and his gay lover collaborated on a book about their lives before, during and after Bishop Righter’s trial. It was published in 1997 with the title Courage to Love and a hefty hard-cover price of $21.95. I recently purchased a hard-cover copy from Amazon.com for $1.55. When it arrived it seemed untouched; the rubber stamp on the title page read: “No longer the property of the St. Louis Public Library.” Had anyone cared to read it? Apparently not. But I would read it, because the long and winding road that Barry Stopfel and his gay lover traveled would eventually bring them to my doorstep. They had chosen the one town, and the one church in that one town, where I would witness Stopfel's ministry at close range from the moment of his arrival until the moment of his departure.
The title of Courage to Love is a premonition that the text favors soap-opera bathos. The dust cover blurb says that “In Courage to Love we read what Barry Stopfel and his partner, Will Leckie, have to say about their experience as gay Christian men who have borne the brunt of society’s homophobia, harassment, and hatred. Their story of faithfulness and love will inspire people from all walks of life in the fight against bigotry and intolerance,” which sounds wonderful until you read the book and discover that the co-authors have defined as “homophobic” and “hateful” anyone who has any reservations about opening the Episcopal priesthood to exemplars of the gay counterculture. In truth, this purported documentary is, by turns, a lopsided mash note to Barry Stopfel from his adoring gay lover and an intellectually-dishonest gay-liberation polemic. For each if its 287 pages Courage to Love clings tightly to the itemized guidelines for gay propaganda first articulated by Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill back in 1987. Will Leckie is careful to follow the Kirk-and-Pill admonition to “talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible”, on the theory that a relentless bombardment of such chat will make gayness seem normal. At every opportunity Leckie is quick to “use talk to muddy the moral waters” and “raise theological objections of our own about conservative interpretations of biblical teachings…” Will Leckie also favors the Kirk/Pill admonition to “undermine the moral authority of homophobic churches by portraying them as an antiquated backwater.” In short, smear your intellectual opponents rather than engage them in honest debate. Leckie unfailingly follows point two of the gay agenda: “Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers.” As Kirk and Pill remind gay activists, “In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be included by reflex to assume the role of protector.” A reflex, by definition, is an action undertaken without the benefit of intelligent reflection. This is another attempt by gays to avoid any debate of the possible consequences of embracing the gay counterculture. In Courage to Love, the victimizers are defined as anyone with an honest doubt about the wisdom of populating the Episcopal clergy with ever more flagrantly homosexual priests. Anyone with the courage to raise an objection is instantly demonized. Leckie and Stopfel are facile masters of the ad hominem attack. There are no debates in Courage to Love. Let’s unpack this gay couple’s self-portrait and then I’ll fill you in on the true consequences of Barry Stopfel’s hit-and-run rectorship of Saint George’s church.
Though the book is Barry Stopfel’s vehicle for shaping the public’s notion of events, the text is presented in the voice of Will Leckie. These two gays met in 1985 on the campus of Union Theological Seminary. Leckie had approached Stopfel and blurted out, “I’ve always had a thing for men’s thighs.” They hit it off at once: “Our hands reached out and met. He held my hand just that one moment too long and too tender…I was, as they say, completely taken by this man whose eyes shone like stormy afternoons.” Leckie has a sweet-tooth for sappy prose.
Stopfel’s first love had been a dancer and male model named Peter. They had held a private ceremony at home in which a Roman Catholic priest had blessed their union, but…. “As gay men, our liberation is directly linked with the necessity to be sexual beings. Instinctively we sought a kind of salvation from our loneliness and self-loathing that could come only from another man’s touch. We survived the exile and critical judgment of our culture with a sexual carnival…” He’s saying that gays are not social outcasts because they are promiscuous, but are promiscuous because they are outcasts. He blames straight society for gay immorality. Gays are indiscriminate rump jumpers because society disdains indiscriminate rump jumpers. Welcome to the fairyland of gay logic.
A year after the blessing of their union Peter announced his desire for an “unrestricted” relationship because “the cornucopia of sexual opportunity beckoned.” It seems that “Peter felt he had a right, if not an obligation, to partake in the freedom of being gay, to express himself and his longings with other men when circumstances and occasion arose.” Leckie, who will later make a pitch for a gay-marriage privilege, displays no intellectual curiosity about the implications for the institution of marriage if that institution were to embrace a counterculture in which people felt they had a right, if not an obligation, to express themselves and their longings for other people when circumstances and occasions arose. How is the institution of marriage to accommodate a strange people who believe that their “liberation is directly linked with the necessity to be sexual beings”? Leckie won’t touch this subject. After Peter dumps Barry, “Barry had to figure out how to be a single gay man in New York City”, then Peter contracts AIDS.
At seminary, Stopfel tells Leckie that “The Episcopal Church has lots of gay and some lesbian clergy and lots of lesbian and gay members in lay leadership. But it doesn’t have a lot of integrity in the way they deal with their gay clergy. Most of them I know are in the closet, or else marginally employed.” Stopfel wants to be an openly gay priest; advisors suggested he maintain his cover until after his ordination. Leckie urges him to be open about his sexuality: “God picked you up from the hell of your own fears, your own closet, because she has a job for you.”
Stopfel is at a loss to understand how a church which “ordains alcoholics, adulterers, pederasts, wife beaters everyday” can tell him his good character is nullified by being ‘honest’ about his sexuality. The Reverend Ken Swanson responds to this by telling Stopfel that the Church doesn’t ordain ‘confessed adulterers.’” Stopfel is aghast. “Swanson seemed to be equating queers with alcoholics, child molesters, spouse abusers, and adulterers…” Well, sort of. Pederasts are just a sub-set of the gay community. The North American Man/Boy Love Association was welcome at the gay-pride parades as an authentic dimension of the gay community until their presence became an impediment to the gay social agenda. Their current exclusion is a matter of political expediency, not moral revulsion. And don’t gays and alcoholics share an inborn predisposition to their respective appetites? So who are these gays to look down their noses at alcoholics? Alcoholics are expected to struggle against their inclination to promiscuous consumption for the good of themselves and for the good of society. The gay sub-culture wants only to wallow in sexual excess. So what makes gays superior to alcoholics? And yet the prissy Reverend Stopfel feels free to talk down to alcoholics even though Christian communities have held homosexuality in low regard for millennia, as did Jewish communities long before the Christian era. These religious communities have defined themselves as a people who do not do certain things. Anal intercourse is one of those things. You could say that among traditional Jews and Christians an anus-centered sexuality just doesn’t pass the smell test.
When the Reverend Swanson tells Barry that “he personally loved Barry but, as a priest, he had to hate the sin,” Barry becomes incensed: “Hate the sin but love the sinner? How could anyone live with such incongruity in their compassion?” What incongruity? This is a constant theme of Christian love. Rather than make Barry an outcast, Swanson wants Barry to repent, to renounce his waywardness, and to live as one with the righteous. Barry doesn’t believe that his homosexuality is a sin, but rather a gift from God. He sees Swanson as a man blinded by “homophobia”, which he calls “a straight person’s disease.” Barry’s alternative world view is so vivid that he is blinded to the consistency of Swanson’s Christian perspective.
When Barry can’t find anyone to sponsor him for ordination in New York, he casts an eye across the Hudson River. The name John Shelby Spong pops into Barry’s head: “He’s the most outspoken advocate we’ve got in the Episcopal Church…” and, “Bishop Spong is a courageous man. He’s been out front for women’s ordination, and then for gays and lesbians. He and a diocesan task force published a fantastic document on human sexuality and family life, declaring queer families as vital as straight ones.”
The pamphleteering patter of Barry’s speech is the fault of Will Leckie. Much of Courage to Live is given a faux authority by the use of quotation marks when, in fact, all of the dialog has been shaped by the way Will Leckie and Barry Stopfel have remembered it at a later date. Consequently, the flat, homogenized, tone of Courage to Love is the product of Will Leckie, Earnest Gay Activist. The “fantastic document on human sexuality” to which Barry refers is the brainchild of the ultra-liberal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey. Here’s a quotation from the report of the Task Force on Changing Patterns of Sexuality and Family Life, which Leckie and Stopfel were eager to include in Courage to Love: “It is our conclusion that by suppressing our sexuality and by condemning all sex which occurs outside of traditional marriage, the Church has thereby obstructed a vitally important means for persons to know and celebrate their relatedness to God. The teachings of the Church have tended to make us embarrassed about rather than grateful for our bodies. As a means of communion with other persons our bodies sacramentally become means to communion with God.”
This is a remarkable statement of belief. It asserts that rollicksome fornication is really a sacramental communion with God. Hey, if you can get the milk without buying the cow, why not? Why restrain our impulses, why commit to a “traditional marriage”? Life is too short; let’s just drop our pants and begin some frisky “communion with other persons” as a means of “communion with God.” How long will it be until your randy teenager throws this “church-approved” rationalization in your face?
As a defender of homosexuality, Will Leckie is amazingly restrained, offering us almost nothing in the way of particulars. Until page 71 of Courage to Love the physical relationship between Barry and Will consists of holding hands, making eye contact, taking long walks together and eating lots of ice cream sundaes (I am not making this up.) On page 71 Will recalls the weekend in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania when they sexualized their relationship, when “logic nodded off and left our hearts to reach out and discover each other all over again.” That’s it. Later in the book they share a fleeting kiss in a parked car. Is Leckie just being demure, or does he understand that the reality of what gays really do would suffocate all sympathy for his social agenda? After that kiss, it’s back to hand holding and ice cream sundaes for the rest of the book. For all its preaching about gay liberation, Courage to Love has all the corseted primness of an old Andy Hardy movie. The gay propagandist in Will Leckie is determined to portray his gay lover as the ideal “poster priest” for an ever-expanding gay Episcopal clergy.
On page 72, the Reverend Leckie makes a remarkable statement of belief: “The whole of creation is the embodied expression of God’s loving, creative heart, every color, stripe, orientation, and belief. And it is all created good.” This sounds so sweet, so inclusive. But it’s just polemical sleight-of-hand. It is delivered in the expectation that the recipient will conflate “created good” with “morally acceptable.” It certainly doesn’t address what theologians call the Problem of Evil. And if “it is all created good” what are we to make of AIDS? Is AIDS good? Is any disease, any random mutation, any wild-eyed fanaticism, good? Maybe so. From the lofty perspective of a god, these things may be “good” for us because they make us struggle with adversity and moral ambiguity. But that’s a far cry from mere mortals declaring that any orientation is morally acceptable. We can only think less of the seminary-trained Will Leckie for attempting this rhetorical dodge. But, then again, the gay agenda specifically advises every gay activist to “muddy the moral waters.”
Eventually our gay couple arrives in New Jersey. Says Will Leckie on page 76: “Without benefit of a ceremony and a civil license, gay people frequently experience major-appliance purchases from Sears to be among the singularly defining moments of their relationships. With one ‘Charge it!’ we were the proud owners of a Lady Kenmore washer/dryer combo and were as hitched as any couple in America.” Seminary wasn’t wasted on Leckie.
Soon the Reverend Jack Croneberger had given Barry the position of lay assistant at the Church of the Atonement in Tenafly, New Jersey. Leckie had a snit when Croneberger introduced Barry from out of the congregation and “completely ignored the man sitting next to him.”
Three months before Bishop Spong chose to ordain an openly gay male, Robert Williams, to the Episcopal priesthood, he had a sit down with Barry Stopfel during which he asked Stopfel, “Do you believe human sexuality is determined or a choice?”, to which Stopfel replied, “I don’t believe anyone would choose to be gay given the culture of fear and animosity we live in right now.” Stopfel goes on to say, “I didn’t wake up one day after a long-term relationship with a woman and say, ‘Hey! Wouldn’t it be fun to be one of the most despised people on earth? I think I’ll try being gay for a while.” This is standard gay-activist boilerplate; in a couple of sentences the speaker has absolved himself of all responsibility for whatever expressive behaviors may arise from his gayness. The speaker has suggested that his gayness comes from Nature and is therefore “good.” The speaker has portrayed himself as a “victim” deserving of the listener’s sympathy and simultaneously deflected the listener’s critical faculties away from any examination of the many morally provocative behaviors common to the gay counterculture. The notion that no one would choose a sexual lifestyle that is “despised” is a denial of one of the gay culture’s distinguishing sub-groups: masochists. What would the gay social scene be without gays who hungered to be whipped, urinated upon and “fisted”? Every gay who plays the passive role in anal intercourse is upholding the slave ethos of modern homosexuality.
The word “despised”, by the way, does not mean “hated”, it means “held in disdain,” which is pretty much the way the homosexuals of ancient Greece would have regarded those modern gays who trace their interpersonal behaviors to the Marquis de Sade.
Barry Stopfel’s facile dismissal of the notion that free will played any role in his decision to become expressively homosexual in his behavior is a refutation of the notion that he has free will. Barry is presenting himself as a moral blank slate, a sexual automaton who must obey his splinter-group sexual urges. On top of this he reflexively demonizes anyone who might question his suitability as a moral role model, smearing them as “homophobes” and “haters.” Not once in all of Courage to Love does Stopfel or his alter ego engage in any reasoned dialog, which suggests that they themselves believe their positions would be difficult to defend. Whenever they are challenged, they scamper for shelter in their “victim” status. Stopfel and Leckie won’t even acknowledge that there could be a counter argument. Because they’re gay they couldn’t possibly be bigots. For them, “gay bigot” is an oxymoron. And yet Stopfel longed to be a priest so that he could lecture other people about morality and open mindedness.
In 1990 a retired Episcopal bishop named Walter Righter ordained Barry Stopfel to the Episcopal deaconate. After that, ten bishops moved to bring Bishop Righter before a Church court on charges that he had violated Episcopal doctrine by ordaining someone openly indulging in homosexual behavior. A conviction in this heresy trial was a long shot. At least four of the nine bishops sitting in judgment of Righter had themselves knowingly performed or endorsed the ordination of homosexuals. The Church establishment, led by Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning, had long been “gay friendly.” If the numbers quoted by Integrity, the Episcopal Church’s gay caucus, are accurate, then as many as 40% of the Episcopal clergy may already homosexuals. This would mean that you are twenty times more likely to encounter a homosexual among the Episcopal clergy than you are to encounter one among the general population. This powerful gay voting block within the Episcopal Church has only to recruit a mere 11% from the pool of sympathetic non-gay clergy to win any vote on any matter relating to homosexuality. This means that the Episcopal Church has been so thoroughly colonized by homosexuals that it is not merely a “gay friendly” church, but is well on its way to becoming a gay church.
In any case, the retired Bishop Righter had been assisting Newark’s “Jack” Spong, the Episcopal left’s clearest voice. Walter Righter agreed to ordain Barry Stopfel because Spong was already in the doghouse for ordaining the flamingly gay Robert Williams, who soon became notorious as the gay priest who told the world that he believed it would be a good thing if the saintly Mother Teresa got herself laid. Bishop Spong had fantasized that Robert Williams would miraculously become something other than what he was: a living vessel of gay counterculture values.
Undiscouraged and incapable of disillusion, Bishop Spong had pressed ahead with his campaign to give the Episcopal Church its first openly gay “poster priest.” After some in-depth quizzing, Spong had selected Barry Stopfel to play the role of gay poster boy. Walter Righter got tapped to do the ordination because Spong himself couldn’t endure another embarrassment. Walter Righter told the Religion News Service: “Jack and the presiding bishop [Browning] agreed it was better for Jack not to ordain Barry…because [Spong] was a lightning rod for controversy, and I was kind of a safe person from Iowa.”
Though the gay issues captured the attention of the media, the pivotal question raised during the heresy trial was this: Does the Episcopal Church have a doctrine that says that sex outside of marriage is a sin? This begged the question, “Will the Episcopal Church change its rites to permit same-sex marriages?
Stopfel’s ordination came 12 days after the House of Bishops affirmed a statement on sexuality by Edmond Browning and his Council of Advice, which said: “We affirm the traditional teaching of the church on marriage, marital fidelity and sexual chastity as the standard of Christian sexual morality. Candidates for ordination are expected to conform to this standard.” It was all hypocritical window dressing to conceal from the faithful what was really being planned by the Church’s gay colonists and their gay-friendly fellow travelers. Bishop Righter claims that Edmond Browning gave behind-the-scenes tactical advice to those who were preparing to defy Browning’s own Council of Advice. According to Integrity, the Episcopal Church’s gay-affairs apparatus, 42 or more bishops had already ordained non-celibate homosexuals. For all practical purposes the notion that the authority of the Episcopal Church rested on Scripture had been flung into the gutter; the families sitting in the pews hadn’t gotten the news and the plotters were in no hurry to enlighten them.
So, it was a show trial from the very beginning. The bishops who had filed the presentment against Walter Righter knew their chances were small. Said Bishop James Stanton: “But we had to do something to let people know that some of us were not going to let centuries of Christian doctrine be thrown out without opposition.” When parish priest Father J. Stephen Freeman of Oak Ridge, Tennessee proposed a simple canon law that said : “All clergy…in the Diocese of East Tennessee shall maintain a standard of faithful sexual conduct, abstaining from all sexual relations outside the bonds of holy matrimony,” his motion was soundly crushed 117 to 60. Bishop Righter’s fans hold that the Episcopal Church has no enforceable doctrine that prevents the ordination of countless lusty homosexuals. Curiously, they made this assertion even as they denounced Father Freeman’s proposed canon law as unnecessary and redundant. So the gay-friendly insurgents speak from both sides of their mouths. Observed Episcopal Divinity School Dean William Rankin: “Heresy implies orthodoxy, and we have no such thing in the Episcopal Church.” Therefore, the phrase “Episcopal doctrine” is nonsensical. If Barry Stopfel’s ordination had any positive consequence it may have been to expose the Episcopal Church for what it is: a marriage-optional, sexually permissive, moral “free-fire” zone.
Jack Spong had ordained Robert Williams to serve as the executive director of The Oasis, an Episcopal mission designed to coax gays and lesbians into the church. At a symposium in Detroit, Williams exposed his gay-culture acculturation during a Q&A session. To the assembled, Williams blurted’ “There is no way celibacy can be justified apart from a sex negative philosophy.” Williams was asked, “Do you think Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s life would be substantially enriched if she took herself a lesbian lover?” to which Williams responded, “If you’re asking me if Mother Teresa ought to get laid, the answer is yes.” According to a news account, the audience was stunned into silence with the exception of those who gasped.
Will Leckie’s response to this episode is that “Bishop Spong had gone out on a limb, putting diocesan money where his mouth was, and chose a man he believed to be strong enough to handle the job. He was wrong and found himself thrown to the lions along with his first openly gay priest.” The Reverend Leckie is wrong. Robert Williams had the strength of his convictions; he was simply giving the world the commonplace gay perspective on sexuality. Throughout Courage to Love Leckie himself repeatedly harps on the theme that the Christian Church has harmed humanity by repressing its sexual impulses. On page 133, Leckie tells us that, “Jack [Spong] believed that if acceptance of a healthy ethic of sexuality was ever to happen, the Church had to have openly gay and lesbian role models.” Just what every child needs.
The Reverend Leckie explains to us that “In ordaining Robert Williams to the priesthood, Jack Spong only did in public what the Church has always done in secret. Well over one hundred bishops in this country and abroad have knowingly ordained well-qualified but closeted and semi-closeted gay men and lesbian women to the priesthood…”(p.121) So the increasing friendliness of the Episcopal Church toward gays is not just an expression of the Church’s big-heartedness, but also a reflection of its clergy’s increasing gayness. Leckie is telling us that the Episcopal Church has long been the target of homosexual colonization and may be approaching that critical point where it can be rolled over by the gay lobby within. This church already blesses homosexual unions. If its clergy already has a gayness density twenty times higher than the general population, can this church’s endorsement of homosexual wedlock be far away?
The Intellectual Cowardice of the Gay Insurgents
Barry Stopfel calls to his gay lover, “Honey, you’ve got to read this!” An anonymously written letter had arrived at the Church of the Atonement. A concerned parishioner had written, “Do you really think that parents with young children, or pre-adolescent teenagers, will look forward to joining The Church of the Atonement that has a homo-sexual priest on its staff? I wonder how many parents who had children in the Sunday School the past year would have kept them attending it had they known that Barry was ‘gay’. Obviously, many of the women who attend The Church of the Atonement are utterly naïve as to the true nature and personal lives of homosexuals (both male and female). TV shows smiling lovable homos, arms entwined, occasionally kissing each other on the cheek, as they march down Fifth Avenue…It wasn’t sheer caprice that, since the earliest days of Christianity, the Church has condemned homosexuality as a sin. All physical perversions against the natural functions of males and females with regard to their sexual activities have been regarded as crimes against nature.” The writer’s position is clearly stated; the spelling and syntax are good; the punctuation is fine and the vocabulary is above average.
The writer goes on to request that the leadership of The Church of the Atonement take a poll of its members about the wisdom of hiring gay staff members. The writer is really asking that the topic of gay clergy be opened for discussion. It’s not an outrageous request. After all, gay clergy in the not-so-different Catholic Church may have ruined the lives of as many as 100,000 young male parishioners, so why not at least discuss the decision to colonize the Episcopal Church with gay clergy? The writer also included an outline of gay sexual behaviors for the enlightenment of the aforementioned “utterly naïve”.
This letter provided Barry Stopfel with a golden opportunity to present a well-reasoned reply; both Stopfel and Leckie were seminary trained, after all. Instead, they displayed the vacancy of their intellectual position; they had nothing to offer as a defense. Leckie pounced on a spelling error in the letter: the mystery writer had misspelled “penis.”
“ ‘Penus’!” I shouted. “He spelled it p-e-n-U-s!” To which Barry responds: “It’s really funny. Jack Croneberger also thinks it’s funny, which is good. It’d be trouble otherwise.” They can’t get over the spelling error. “My God!”, Barry shouts, “Penus!”
Barry Stopfel goes on: “Since Jack’s away, he asked me to respond to this with the vestry.” Leckie chimes in by asking “What response could there be but howling laughter…?” It doesn’t occur to him that a reasoned argument might be in order.
By declaring the writer’s literate complaint to be unworthy of a response because of a spelling error, Leckie and Stopfel revealed their intellectual cowardice. Reducing this concerned parishioner to a nonentity because of a keystroke error is the weakest of all ad hominem attacks. The letters I and U are side by side on the keyboard; does mistakenly touching the wrong one invalidate everything a person is and thinks? And who are Will Leckie and Barry Stopfel to criticize other people’s English? Did anyone proofread Courage to Love? Apparently not.
On page 3, Bishop Righter is presenting Stopfel for ordination: “You know the importance of this ministry and the weight of your responsibility in presenting Barry Stopfel for ordination to the sacred order of deacons.” Then Leckie says: “Bishop Righter let the enormity [sic] and moment of this occasion settle over us.” The word enormity has only one meaning among the literate; my dictionary defines it as “the quality of passing all moral bounds, excessive wickedness, outrageousness.” Did the Reverend Leckie really mean to suggest that Barry’s ordination was an excessive wickedness passing all moral bounds? Does his choice of words now render the Reverend Leckie a fool so foolish as to be forever undeserving of a reasoned reply to any of his concerns?
On page 46, Leckie screws up again. The Reverend Ken Swanson has agreed to sponsor Barry for ordination. Barry calls Will with the happy news. Barry tells Will, “I’m going to become a priest.” Then Conan the Grammarian (Leckie) writes: “When he finally said it out loud, our voices froze. For a long minute we listened across the telephone line to each other breathing, the sheer enormity [sic] of the revelation marked by silent awe as we experienced the Deity passing by.” He’s a master of unintentional humor.
On page 130, Barry is unhappy about circumstances beyond his control. He’s feeling tormented. Then he shouts to God: “Where are you, you masochistic [sic] bastard! How dare you trick me into believing? Where are you now? Some God…You just dumped me. Hung me up to die! How could you, you son of a bitch!” Surely, the Reverend Leckie meant to say sadistic bastard. Every adult homosexual knows the difference between masochistic and sadistic. Perhaps he made a mistake in his rush to get his ideas on the page. Shall we call this an innocent oversight, or should we banish him forever to the outer darkness of social excommunication?
On page 276 the Reverend Leckie takes a poke at Bishop Andrew Fairfield of North Dakota who once spoke at “disturbing length” about the normative sexual relationship being one “that incorporated the complimentary [sic] opposites of male and female.” The bishop was trying to convey his belief that males and females complete (complement) one another; he was not suggesting that males and females flatter (compliment) one another. What a difference a letter makes. The Reverend Leckie made a grade-schooler’s spelling error, but he doesn’t have the excuse that I is anywhere near E on the keyboard; it’s not a simple keystroke error. Does this error signal that the Reverend Leckie is a know nothing? Shall we vilify him in the manner suggested by the authors of the gay agenda, Kirk and Pill, who instructed gay activists to vilify all of their opponents.
And who the hell is Bishop Croneberger to laugh at other people’s mistakes? It was Croneberger who personally confirmed my son into the Episcopal Church. At the peak moment of my son’s confirmation the bishop gave my son a new name, calling him Jason. My son is not a Jason; his name is not even a J word. Is Bishop Croneberger a complete dunce for doing that? I’m not the person to ask.
What we have here are three arrogant guys who think they are above answering critical questions from parishioners. “Don’t you dare respond to this illiterate trash!” Leckie advises his lover. One keystroke error and the writer is an “illiterate” beneath their contempt.
Barry’s “response” was a pathetic ad hominem assault on the writer. Barry fashions a letter to the parish in which he says, “What is obvious to me is the author’s sickness regarding their [sic] own human sexuality. Besides anger and disgust, the only other decent human response is one of compassion for an individual who must be deeply troubled…” And so on. It’s Barry’s position that because the author is concerned that his church has swerved sharply away from Scripture by ordaining anal erotics that the author must have a sickness regarding his own sexuality. He then displays his “compassion” by calling the author “deeply troubled” before the entire congregation. When three-year-olds display this sort of compassion they call each other poopy-heads.
So is the infiltration of gay counterculture values into traditional religious institutions and childcare facilities completely innocuous? The Reverend Barry Stopfel has nothing to say on this matter of deep concern. He’s above all that. But, clearly, the anonymous letter touched a nerve in our two gay polemicists. When the writer talks of “smiling, lovable homos, arms entwined, occasionally kissing…” he could have been describing Courage to Love, wherein we meet only Stepford Gays, perfect people who fret about coordinated wallpaper colors. Except for one fleeting kiss in a parked car, all of the references to gay physical intimacy are carefully couched in euphemism, and for good reason. The Reverend Leckie had already gotten a whiff of what he could expect from normal people the week before Christmas, on Barry’s “good-bye Sunday” departure from the Church of the Atonement. At this gathering Jack Croneberger was made an honorary gay man. David Norgard of Oasis, the Diocese of Newark’s ministry to homosexuals, wrote a letter of appreciation to Jack Croneberger which was read aloud. It began: “Jack, you have so fought for the acceptance of lesbian and gay people that you have not hesitated to identify yourself totally with us.” The bishop was then presented with several symbolic gifts. Among these gifts was a condom. At the presentation of the condom a “sudden hush” fell over the crowd. Recalls the snippy Reverend Leckie in the superior tone of an arch urbanite, “The symbol was too much for this suburban congregation.” The embarrassed bishop accused Stopfel of trying to humiliate him “suggesting that ‘several people’ were concerned Barry was planning to do something equally vile at the Christmas Eve services.”
Two guys from two different cultures had miscommunicated. Lamented Leckie, “Jack Croneberger transformed an error of judgment into a definition of Barry’s humanity.” Oh, really? That’s sort of similar to the way Leckie and Stopfel transformed an error in spelling into a definition of an anonymous parishioner’s humanity, decency and intelligence. God’s preferred humor is irony.
As a vessel of gay counterculture values Barry Stopfel was as susceptible to social blunders as was Robert Williams. Jack Spong’s score on housebroken gays was zero for two. Says Leckie: “We didn’t realize that, while embracing the concept of homosexuality, many in the church were unwilling to embrace its reality (symbolized, in this instance, by a prophylactic).” He’s a slow learner. Condoms aren’t communion wafers. There is a place for things sacred and a place for things profane. The gay and straight cultures have a different sensibility about where the boundaries between these two places lie.
When the Church of the Atonement informed Barry that they didn’t have enough money in the budget to keep him employed, Barry felt betrayed. According to the gay lovers, “Barry and I misjudged exactly how far they had come with us. In the euphoria of gaining Barry’s ordination, we believed we had been fully accepted as two gay men…” This “suburban congregation” was not yet ready to embrace their vision of a transforming homosexual Utopia.
They needn’t have worried. Bishop Spong had not given up on his model poster priest. Spong recommended Barry to the congregation of Saint George’s Church in Maplewood, New Jersey. Barry met with an advance guard of the Saint George’s search committee and then with the full committee. Leckie describes these meetings in detail. All of his thumbnail portraits of the people he identifies by name ring true; I am acquainted with all of them. Barry was asked about his beliefs, his counseling methods and his sexual ethics.
For pages thereafter Barry and Will agonize about whether Barry will be called to Saint George’s. “We fell in love with the people at Saint George’s, as we felt they had with us. But Barry knows how hard it is for any of us to act on our heart’s passions, particularly when they run contrary to all that we have known.” [Emphasis added] And then: “Against all odds the people of Saint George’s Church had the courage to love us into their community, their heart, and their spirit.” Can’t you just hear the violins?
The gay lovers want us to believe that Barry triumphed against incredible odds, that the people of Saint George’s struggled with, and finally conquered, their horrible, endemic, straight-people’s homophobia. It’s all rubbish. Though Stopfel’s acceptance was not a slam dunk, neither was it as steep a climb as Stopfel makes it sound. Spong chose Saint George’s because it already had a reputation as a “gay friendly” church. The December 4, 2000 issue of the New York Times included an article by Jane Gross titled “Gays Find Warm Welcome in a New Jersey Suburb.” This is how the Times writer describes Maplewood, NJ: “In this suburb, rainbow flags, the symbol of gay pride, flap outside grand Tudors and gracious Colonials, sometimes several per block. At the Maplewood Diner, children blowing bubbles in their chocolate milk often have two fathers or two mothers…” The writer says that Maplewood is “considered by scores of real estate brokers and gay homeowners to be the most welcoming suburb in the region for gay men and lesbians. A same-sex couple holding hands on the train platform is a ho-hum event here…And domestic partners are entitled to a family membership at the town pool without discussion.” Ms. Gross enthuses that “by most accounts, there is no suburb outside the Bay Area or Los Angles where same-sex couples are as accepted as they are here.” One quoted lesbian calls Maplewood “perfect for a lesbian couple with a child.” She’s describing my hometown.
At one time gays preferred nearby Montclair, but when home prices spiked a gay real estate broker “spread the word that a buyer could get more house for the money, a cozy village ambiance, cosmopolitan amenities, a half-hour commute and diversity in Maplewood.” That’s all it took, the recommendation of one gay broker, and the gay stampede to Maplewood was on. Then Ms. Gross dropped this bit of local history: “A compelling magnet is the Episcopal church here, which has 30 years of history as a hospitable place for gays and lesbians. Long before it was common, St. George’s welcomed gay organizations, including Dignity, a group for gay Roman Catholics, to meet in its space.” [Emphasis added]
So, the self-portrait painted by Barry Stopfel in Courage to Love is fraudulent. Stopfel and his gay lover weren’t facing a straight-people’s inquisition. The search committee included gays. Bishop Spong had steered Stopfel toward Saint George’s because it was a soft target. The suggestion that Stopfel was some sort of gay pioneer valiantly penetrating a forbidding wilderness of straight-folk prejudice is preposterous. The Saint George’s community had long ago been colonized by gays.
But it wasn’t until the arrival of Barry Stopfel that Saint George’s became so gay and so odd that many of the original congregants, gay and straight alike, began to leave Saint George’s church. Once he had attained a position of power as rector of Saint George’s the gay utopian inside Barry Stopfel began to express itself. The conceit among gays like Stopfel and Leckie is that they are the vanguard of some higher, more liberated, more insightful, more sensitive, better integrated form of human life. Their mission is to free us all from the confinement of our traditional moral restraints. That part of him made Barry Stopfel something of a one-trick pony.
At our first encounter Barry and Will showed signs of newcomer’s jitters. That soon passed. Both Barry and Will are practiced performers. Barry had joined Actors Equity as early as his junior year in high school. Will Leckie is described on the dust jacket of his book as an actor who toured with the National Shakespeare Company and acted with the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater. All of the many sermons that I witnessed at Saint George’s church were polished performances. Barry is an excellent showman; in public he was always smiling, smooth and congenial. And yet…
When a woman on the search committee first told me that a homosexual had been chosen as the new rector, the first words that came to mind were: Trojan Horse. But it was not my place to offer opinions about the church; I was never a parishioner. I attended services irregularly and on major holidays; I was in and out weekly assisting my wife with altar guild, cooking for church suppers, building signs and stage sets for the church musicals and attending coffee hours. I sat, I watched, I listened.
Throughout his rectorship Barry Stopfel had a vision of a brighter gay tomorrow. He preached the gay liberation mantra; he flung open the door to gay activist groups. He also had all the quasi-autistic shortcomings of the gay male: He couldn’t relate well to women; he had little interest in the nurturance of children. He was uninterested in the church school, which is the source of future Episcopalians. He contented himself with a single children’s service once a month, which maintained the illusion that he was doing something meaningful for the spiritual life of children. Stopfel wanted what he wanted; he was not much interested in opinions that differed with his own. He surrounded himself with those people who shared his opinions. These people became the Saint George’s “in crowd.” Stopfel packed positions of influence with as many gays as he could.
When the heresy trial of Walter Righter cast Barry in the spotlight, the actor in him went to heaven. The characterizations in Courage to Love of Barry as someone who struggled with the media are contradicted by Barry Stopfel’s observed behavior. By all indications, he loved the press attention. As rector of Saint George’s he could have excluded the press from the church building, but instead he invited them inside with their cameras and their lights and their cables and their sound equipment. The church became a stage set for showcasing Barry Stopfel, Model Gay Minister. When the press arrived the group of parishioners near the altar was packed with gays. I recall one glowing article in the Newark Star Ledger that recounted one of these rigged services. Every person quoted in the article was known to the congregation to be a homosexual, but not a single one of them was identified as gay in the article. Therefore, all of New Jersey was given the false impression that everything was wonderful at Saint George’s. In truth, the place had been potemkinized; it was a beaming false façade.
What made Saint George’s so meaningful to my wife when she first joined that congregation was the strong presence of a women’s spirituality. There had been a women’s group led by the Reverend Diana Clark that was very rewarding to the women of Saint George’s. Diana left in 1991. In some congregations the rector’s wife will become the nucleus of a women’s sensibility in a church, but Will Leckie couldn’t fill the bill. Saint George’s was blessed with the presence of the Reverend Anne Bolles-Beaven, who had a wonderful way with children; unfortunately her days at Saint George’s were numbered.
Barry was forever dickering with the prayer service. He substituted readings from modern literature for the New Testament readings. He dumped the Nicene Creed. He would dismiss the ushers and let the congregants “bum rush” the communion rail. People became confused about which was the appropriate form for collective worship as Barry Stopfel simply winged it, making last-minute decisions about what would come next. His Reverend Queeg impression began to wear thin. Congregants began to leave the church – lots of them, both gays and straights. Sunday morning visits to the Episcopal church in neighboring Millburn meant a reunion with old friends from Saint George’s church.
After the excitement of the heresy trial, Barry requested a generous sabbatical, even though he hadn’t served anywhere near the seven years that usually precede a sabbatical. When he returned it was only for a short time. Then he announced to the vestry that he needed more time off to cope with a health problem. He said he wanted Anne Bolles-Beaven gone by the time he returned. It was his way or the highway and his way was the gay way. He had little to offer Saint George’s after the heresy trial. He wasn’t around much: St. George’s church was led by a series of interim rectors.
I’ll always remember him for his harangues about homophobia. From the pulpit he denounced Cardinal John O’Connor for locking the doors of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral during the Gay Pride Parade. It never occurred to Stopfel that Cardinal O’Connor might be a role model for rectors like himself. The previous year gays had invaded a Saint Patrick’s worship service, taunted people at prayer, thrown condoms everywhere and urinated in the pews. The only reason the Gay Pride Parade organizers insist on starting their march as far north as St. Patrick’s is so that gays can assault the church. Gay males prancing about dressed as nuns and simulating sex acts are a staple of the Gay Pride Parade. So the cardinal was just being a good shepherd to his flock when he closed the door on a bunch of gay jerks. But Barry Stopfel could never see the world from that perspective. Gays were the tribe he belonged to. He knew what felt pleasant to him and he imbued those things with a patina of goodness. He was an avatar of gay self-righteousness and he would countenance no contradiction.
When last heard from, Barry Stopfel was dispensing his signature brand of gay liberation theology to the UUs at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Susquehanna Valley. His updated resume says that he is using his acting skills at such gigs as “Sexual Diversity: Creating Community,” at Rider University. Barry was the keynote speaker at the National Gay and Lesbian Role Model Symposium in conjunction with Pridefest Philadelphia, “the largest gay and lesbian cultural symposium in the country.” Barry was “guest speaker and small group facilitator” for national and local gay and lesbian organizations. And finally, Barry Stopfel, the prim Stepford Gay who would always duck any discussion of how homosexuals actually behaved, became the first recipient of the Tom Stoddard National Role Model Award “presented to a person who has made a distinguished contribution to social changes for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered community.” Did I mention that he was the first gay to receive the Central Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Achievement Award? Barry, it seems, has finally achieved his dream: he has become a celebrity. The heresy trial of Walter Righter made Barry a martyr of the gay liberation movement and he is now milking his studied victimhood for all it’s worth – money and the warm embrace of the white-hot spotlight.
It was all so predictable. The truth is that any gay priest who called upon the gay community to renounce sexual promiscuity and anonymous sex and sadomasochistic degradation would be roundly denounced as a self-hating homophobe. He or she would be pushed outside the gay community’s circle of concern. That’s why gay priests don’t call on promiscuous gays to repent; that’s why gay priests aren’t doing their job. That’s why an increasing number of gays in the Episcopal Church will render the Church increasingly ineffective in its nominal mission to decrease the amount of sin in the world. If they can’t bring themselves to criticize flagrant depravity, then what use are they? Should the Episcopal clergy be maintained in comfort at the expense of parishioners for no better purpose than to babble bogus pop-psych gay-liberation agit-prop from the pulpit about “homophobia”? The gay social scene is a moral train wreck. People see this wreckage and their response is indignation and disgust. These responses are signs of a healthy moral sensibility. Why call it “homophobia”? Why lash out at the righteous and tell them that they are in the grips of a sickness? Why enter an upside-down fairyland where bad is good and good is bad? If the numbers quoted by Integrity are accurate, and the Episcopal clergy is 40% gay, then this church is about to be rolled over, to become an instrument of the gay social agenda. Thereafter the prestige of the Episcopal Church will be used to leverage other churches and social institutions. If these numbers are true, then of what use is the Episcopal clergy to the 98% of the population who are not gay? Would you really want to receive family counseling from some guy who learned everything he knows about how it feels to be a normal heterosexual from taking classes? Do you want to receive guidance in sexual ethics from priests who peel off their white collars at vacation time and then make a beeline for Fire Island or house parties in Provincetown?
The Episcopal Church, like the liberal media, has a serious “truth in packaging” problem. A gay clergy that will not identify itself as gay is pulling a crooked bait-and-switch on the public. Every gay clergyman, like every gay journalist, should be clearly identified as such if they are going to speak on issues of social import. Black authors can’t hide their race; women authors, for the most part, are clearly identified. Their racial and gender perspectives enrich their texts. But thousands of gay journalists and gay clergy conceal their ingrained biases and pretend to be no more than open-minded people, well-meaning and piously tolerant. In truth, they have an intensely personal interest in promoting the gay social agenda. If we are going to have an honest debate about gay marriage, for example, then every gay in the debate should be clearly identified. Therefore, outing every gay in the debate is a moral imperative.
We know now that many journalists who wrote articles favorable to the tyrant Saddam Hussein were on his payroll. Shouldn’t we know all their names? Shouldn’t we reevaluate their professional ethics in the light of our newfound knowledge? Likewise, gay journalists who have a self interest in the wholesale moral re-zoning of America, from gay marriage, to gay adoption, to revising age-of-consent laws and more, should be identified as people with a personal interest in the social changes which their articles encourage. Why should all those gay writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post get to use the prestige of their newspapers to leverage public opinion without ever revealing that they are, in fact, dedicated propagandists for a transforming homosexual social agenda? The manner in which the Times has presented gayness and gay issues to the public is perfectly consonant with the itemized agenda of gay activists Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill. Those unflattering behaviors of the gay counterculture that Kirk and Pill warned would be troublesome are deemed “not fit to print” by the New York Times. Isn’t it high time that the dapper and impeccably moisturized publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., came clean about the true agenda of the gay hit squad on his staff, the one that is now hiding behind a mask of faux professionalism? That goes double for the bishops of the Episcopal Church. Either deal with the American public honestly or take your church and shove it. If they can only deal with us from a position of concealment, then this church has gone out of the morality business.
The Gay Agenda Is Their Real Bible
Because Scripture has nothing positive to say about homosexuality, the gay-friendly clergy are agitating for a New Age theology that diminishes the moral worth of Scripture. We are told that the very antiquity of Scripture, from which it derives so much of its authority, in fact, makes the Bible merely old fashioned, not new, hip and cutting edge. To the New Age theologians the Bible is so last week. The New Age theologians propose a revised Christianity, one centered on a re-imagined Jesus, a Jesus overflowing with uncritical, unconditional mother love. In the new Christian cosmos there will be no Judgment Day; everyone is embraced and accepted just as they are. The notion of repentance has been retired to the broom closet.
The intent of new-wave Christianity is to be therapeutic, to reconcile people to their behavioral quirks, to welcome as congregants people whose behavior would previously have defined them as un-Christian, because Christians defined themselves as a people who did not indulge in certain behaviors. This is nothing less than a redefinition of Christianity. A similar gay-friendly revisionism is infiltrating the synagogues, stretching the definition of the word Jew to its elastic limit.
In the New Age Church of Fashion the Scriptures are seen as a stumbling block to the church’s new mission of making the congregants feel good about themselves, just as they are. Sinners have been redefined as victims of society’s narrow judgmentalism, of its bigotry, of its inability to appreciate their special “otherness.” As part of the new gay criticism, all critics of homosexuality must be reviled. This rule holds true even if it means directing ad hominem attacks at the authors of the Bible.
For example, when a letter arrived at the Church of the Atonement in Tenafly, NJ, that was critical of the church for hiring an actively homosexual deacon, the deacon’s response was to launch a biting ad hominem attack against the letter writer which addressed none of the writer’s critical objections. After that, the church’s rector, Jack Croneberger, stage crafted a Service of Affirmation for the Ministry of Barry Stopfel, in June 1990. The purpose of this service, according to Stopfel’s gay lover, was this: “Jack believed Barry needed to know that this congregation, and the entire Diocese of Newark, stood with him on his journey toward ordination…” The deacon’s lover tells us that “the Reverend Jack Croneberger carefully set a prepared text on the lectern,” that he “swiftly grounded himself in a text from Psalms,” and then “With great humor and scholarly support he smartly dispatched those Hebrew Scripture passages commonly used to bludgeon homosexuals.” Quoting Croneberger: “Can the Sodom and Gomorrah story really make a convincing case against homosexuality, while at the same time approve the offering of virgin daughters to satisfy an angry mob for what, today, we might call a gang rape?”
Note the sly use of the word “approve.” In the Bible story Lot is desperately trying to avert a disaster, an attack on two angles of the Lord, who are under his roof. It’s not an everyday dilemma. Lot reluctantly offered his daughters to the Sodomites as a kind of sacrifice. I was reminded of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Lot’s reluctant offer sets the stage for the Sodomites to disregard the virgins and clamor, instead, for Lot’s two male guests, thereby revealing the depth of their perversity and depravity. In no way is Lot approving of the rape of his daughters.
During the Second World War a Jewish community was held captive in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the well-armed Nazi forces demanded that the trapped ghetto community relinquish a prescribed number of Jews for transportation to the death camps, a Jewish council, the Judenrat, was compelled to make the horrible decision of who, and whose children, would be sent to their deaths to satisfy Hitler’s perverse quota and thereby avert an even greater disaster: the extermination of the entire Jewish community.
Now, would you describe the Jewish council’s gut-wrenchingly reluctant fulfillment of Hitler’s death quotas as Jewish “approval” of the death quotas? Of course not, because that would be a grotesque distortion of what was really happening. Well, the same is true of Lot’s hard choice, which the Reverend Croneberger is mischaracterizing. The story in Genesis describes a rare event. It is meant to illustrate how depraved the Sodomites were for confronting Lot with such a hideous dilemma. Lot didn’t “approve” of the rape of his children. The Reverend Croneberger has twisted Scripture to advance the gay agenda.
The facile Reverend Croneberger then disparages the Holiness Code in Leviticus: “The code demands execution for cursing, and prohibits the eating of lobster or New England clam chowder or pork chops. On what basis do we determine the parts of the Holiness Code which are from God and for all time, and the parts that might no longer be useful?” The key word here is the word “useful.” Many devout Jews adhere to the Holiness Code because their collective observance of the code serves to define who they are as a people. Therefore, the Holiness Code is immensely useful as a device for maintaining Jewish community cohesion.
Of course, the Reverend Croneberger is looking for an excuse to jettison those parts of the Holiness Code which he finds inconvenient. He goes out of his way to make it look foolish by turning the prohibition against eating shellfish into a wisecrack about New England clam chowder. He avoids the opportunity to enlighten his congregation about the Holiness Code; he tosses off the word “cursing” without making clear that it was an admonition against cursing God (blasphemy) which a truly devout community might believe to be a danger to the entire community. Cursing (hexing) one’s parents, like all the black arts, is also considered a form of blasphemy because one is “playing God”. The sly Reverend Croneberger is trying, by oratorical sleight of hand, to bring his audience to an agreement that the presence of homosexuality on the list of Holiness-Code prohibitions has no more justification than the presence of pork on the list. Have you ever eaten a pork chop? Did it harm you? Of course not! Therefore, the Holiness Code is arbitrary and silly. Therefore, you may now embrace homosexuality without worry. Just ask the Reverend Croneberger.
It’s a specious argument. For devout Jews pork is a symbol and pork may symbolize something else or nothing at all to non-Jews, but homosexuality is a behavior and a world view. Even when it stands acquitted of the charge of immorality, homosexuality is still not value neutral. It is never value neutral. The alien sensibilities of both homosexualities, gay and lesbian, are the driving engines of the two peculiar homosexual subcultures, gay and lesbian. The very strangeness of these subcultures is irrefutable evidence of the strangeness of the sensibilities that created them. Any attempt by mainstream America to embrace these subcultures is an open invitation for the wholesale subversion of vital social institutions to serve the peculiar purposes of homosexuals. To put it another way, the Boy Scouts of America would have suffered the same horrible fate as the Catholic Church if it hadn’t resisted colonization by homosexuals who were aggressively seeking leadership positions within the Boy Scouts.
The Reverend Croneberger continues his effort to elevate homosexuality by de-legitimizing Scripture with a dishonest attack on Saint Paul. In a disparaging tone of voice, Croneberger tells the assembly, “This is the same Paul who was somewhat anti-Semitic and urged men and women not to marry unless it was absolutely necessary. On what basis do we believe that the Church has rightly transcended most of Paul’s teaching about sex, marriage, and women, but by golly, Paul must have been absolutely right about homosexuality?” At this point, Leckie says, “The whole house agreed with him in a shout of laughter, no mean feat in an Episcopal Church.” Both of these seminary-trained propagandists are dissembling.
There is nothing surprising about a “shout of laughter” from the “whole house” when you understand that “the whole house” was packed with homosexuals who had been invited to give the press the false impression that the Atonement congregation was pleased with Barry Stopfel. This house-packing tactic was also employed at both of Barry Stopfel’s stage-crafted ordinations. The Reverend Croneberger’s dishonesty is breathtaking. He is shamelessly playing to a “house” packed with homosexuals who are there to punctuate his political points with their noisy approval. His audience finds his blather convincing because they have no understanding of who Paul was.
In brief, Paul was a contemporary of the Apostles. He was a Jew who considered the earliest Christians to be a troublesome Jewish cult. One day, while traveling toward Damascus, he had a life-altering experience of some sort that precipitated his abrupt and life-long commitment to the First-Century Christian world view. Central to that vision was the belief that Christ would return within Paul’s lifetime to stand in judgment of the world. Paul dedicated his life to the purpose of enlarging the Christian community and preparing that community for the second coming of Christ. To the end of his days he was on the move, visiting Christian communities and exchanging correspondence with Christian communities that were struggling with problems of social cohesion, appropriate behavior, and group definition.
If Paul seems “somewhat anti-Semitic” to the Reverend Croneberger it is because of Paul’s frustrations with such things as the Jewish-Christian sect’s insistence on circumcision, which was an impediment to Paul’s efforts to convert adult gentiles to the new faith.
Paul’s lukewarm attitude toward marriage, as well as his own bachelorhood, is consistent with his belief that the everyday world was about to end. Why make long-term plans when there is no long term, when making such plans would suggest a lack of faith that Christ would soon return?
The Reverend Croneberger knows all this and yet he misleads his audience by telling less than what he knows to be the whole truth. By mischaracterizing Paul as just another grumpy old man, the audience can more easily dismiss Paul and Paul’s moral message. In truth, Paul had been receiving disturbing communications of all sorts of strange couplings and sexual hijinx going on in the far-flung Christian communities where Jewish and gentile converts of sundry cultural backgrounds were now living in close quarters. Paul gave these communities direction on how to comport themselves as Christians. His directions were rooted in Scripture and Jewish custom. Only a few pages into Genesis the black-letter text calls homosexuality an abomination, something offensive to God. What part of the word abomination doesn’t the Reverend Croneberger understand?
It is not my purpose here to establish the correctness of Scripture, but to point out that Scripture has given the Christian and Jewish communities their definition from the present day backward to a time long before the birth of Jesus. This definition distinguished the followers of Scripture from the adherents of Mediterranean mystery cults, with their sexualized ceremonies and their transvestite priests. Among the things proscribed was the unsanitary and unproductive pagan appetite for anal erotism. But now, after all the intervening centuries of struggling to maintain the social cohesion of Christian and Jewish communities, the New Age adherents of religion-lite want to threaten this ancient enterprise for the emotional satisfaction of a comparative handful of sexual oddballs.
Those Randy Gay Sinners
Is homosexuality a sin? This isn’t a word I use much. But Barry Stopfel is a priest; he’s supposed to be in the business of bringing people salvation: saving souls is his job. So, does Barry Stopfel believe that gays are living in sin?
In an open letter to the congregation of the Church of the Atonement, which is quoted in his book Courage to Love (p.152-3), Stopfel wrote: “I believe we are all bound by the same sexual ethic…Whenever human sexuality is self-serving, oppressive, demeaning to oneself or another, or is compulsive and impersonal, it exists in a state of sin…” In only two sentences Stopfel has captured exactly what it is about the homosexual counterculture that repels most people. In the estimation of normal folk the panorama of gay fetish bars, transvestism, sado-masochism, exhibitionism, anal-erotism, coprophilia, and anonymous sexual encounters in public toilets, bathhouses, parks, cars, etc. is, by turns, demeaning, compulsive, impersonal and selfish behavior. Cruising for sex with total strangers is virtually universal among gays. The Kinsey Institute assures us that the average gay male has had about 500 different sexual partners by the average age of 37. The relationships of gays tend to be fleeting; gays have twice as many relationships as normal people. Anonymous sex is the hallmark of the gay social scene. Therefore, by his own definition of sin, Barry Stopfel must agree that those who have abandoned themselves to this gay social scene are living in a state of sin. And yet…not a single time did Barry Stopfel openly admonish the gay community to mend its sinful ways, to walk the narrow path, to get right with God and stop being morally provocative. He preferred to “straight bash” traditional Christians and then scamper back to the gay community for a celebrity ego massage.
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2004
May 29, 2004