Source: UK Gay News
New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson is in England this week on a book tour for his new memoir, In the Eye of the Storm. [Amazon] He's getting plenty of press in the UK for an interview that airs today on BBC in which he lashes out at the way his church's titular leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, has handled criticism of Robinson's consecration.

But he produced a for a less stormy dialogue when he sat down for a chat with British website UK Gay News.

The opening gambit:  “What is the correct way to address a bishop of the American Episcopal Church?”

“Gene would do very nicely,” the bishop suggested.

The conversation soon drifted into the subject of marriage – same-sex marriage and the machinations of the all-powerful conservative Religious Right who “thump the pulpit” at every opportunity about what they call ‘the gay agenda’, which includes marriage equality for same sex couples.

They scream about “the sanctity of marriage”, yet not a murmur when a pop star goes to Las Vegas for a weekend, gets married in a civil ceremony and then has it annulled after a couple of days.

“At the moment, Britney Spears [goes the pop star in question] says ‘I do’ – and receives some 1,100 rights and protections,” the Bishop says when asked how he felt about that particular situation.

“Yet my partner and I who have been together for 20 years do not receive those same protections,” he continues.

“In New Hampshire, we have a new civil union law which my partner and I will take advantage of in early summer.  The law only provides some 400 of those rights and protections.  But it certainly isn’t equality.”

Robinson calls his state's civil union law an "interim step until we provide marriage as a civil right for all citizens."

The bishop said that he and his partner will walk across the street after signing their civil union paper's in June to an Episcopal church where they will "give thanks for our union and will ask God’s – and the gathered community’s – blessing on us."

And he fully expects that that simple act "would be pitched as an international affront" to the Anglican communion.

But Robinson sees those views as counter to the long tradition of the church he serves. He argues that the Episcopal Church in the US and other so-called "liberal" Anglican denominations represent true orthodoxy:

"I think one of the gifts that the Anglican Church has to offer Christendom is that we have always seen scripture taken in its context.  We ask the question what did the writer mean, and what the people for whom it was written understand it meant.

"Only then can we ask the question is it eternally binding upon us.  The more literalist approach is something that is really quite modern – and terribly against the tradition of the Anglican Church."

Full article: Gay Civil Unions or Partnerships Not Full Equality, Says Bishop | UK Gay News