Bishop Schori on Homosexuality — No Sin

Just in case anyone might misunderstand her position on homosexuality, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, newly elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA, spoke her mind in an interview with CNN [these excerpts and others featured on Monday’s radio program].

Now, Reuters is out with a summary of the interview. Some excerpts:

Newly elected leader of the U.S. Episcopal Church Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said on Monday she believed homosexuality was no sin and homosexuals were created by God to love people of the same gender.

Jefferts Schori, bishop of the Diocese of Nevada, was elected on Sunday as the first woman leader of the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church. the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion. She will formally take office later this year.

Interviewed on CNN, Jefferts Schori was asked if it was a sin to be homosexual.

“I don’t believe so. I believe that God creates us with different gifts. Each one of us comes into this world with a different collection of things that challenge us and things that give us joy and allow us to bless the world around us,” she said.

“Some people come into this world with affections ordered toward other people of the same gender and some people come into this world with affections directed at people of the other gender.”

Further:

Asked how she reconciled her position on homosexuality with specific passages in the Bible declaring sexual relations between men an abomination, Jefferts Schori said the Bible was written in a very different historical context by people asking different questions.

“The Bible has a great deal to teach us about how to live as human beings. The Bible does not have so much to teach us about what sorts of food to eat, what sorts of clothes to wear — there are rules in the Bible about those that we don’t observe today,” she said.

“The Bible tells us about how to treat other human beings, and that’s certainly the great message of Jesus — to include the unincluded.”

This is simply facile — the kind of theological reasoning that deserves no respect at all. By dismissing the Bible’s comprehensive teachings on sexuality as equivalent to the Levitical codes concerning food and fabrics, she betrays the utter bankruptcy of her argument.