At the end of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.’s General Convention last summer, an academic friend, not an Episcopalian, asked me, “What argument is advanced against blessing polyamorous unions by those Episcopalians who favor the blessing of same-sex sexual unions?  Or do they pull the trigger and say that the blessing of same-sex unions is only the beginning?”

As almost everyone knows, the Episcopal Church having risen briefly to being newsworthy from her usual irrelevance, the Convention had, by a comfortable margin, confirmed the election of a man openly living with his boyfriend (what other word do you use?) to be the next Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire.  Conservatives protested, appealed to Anglicans in more conservative countries, and promised to have a meeting in October.

Her two houses (the bishops and the deputies, which included four priests and four laymen from each diocese) had also voted by about the same margin to let individual parishes celebrate homosexual “marriages” if they wanted to do so.  This was promoted by almost everyone as a compromise, and “moderates” (timid liberals) rushed to say that it did not give official approval to the “marriages” but only recognized the differences of opinion within the Church and allowed people to talk about them.

Bishop John Lipscomb of Southwest Florida, for example, pledged to “do everything possible to help my diocese turn to godly conversation about what will continue to be a difficult issue.”  Bishop Henry Parsley of Alabama declared that:

Our liturgy expresses what we believe.  So we need to be particularly clear theologically before we move forward liturgically.  This amendment helps us be a church together as we seek theological consensus more solid and sound than we have found.

You have, in these bishops’ words, the reason the moral innovators in the Episcopal Church will not “pull the trigger” and admit that approving homosexual “marriages” is but the first step in expanding the range of sexual practices they will eventually approve—or “celebrate,” in Episcopal jargon.

I wrote my friend to say that this is a trigger the homosexualists will not yet pull, because, though they hold so much political power in the Episcopal Church, getting the votes they need for such measures as homosexual “marriages” depends on keeping the “moderates” from seeing what is going on—or, more accurately, keeping the more conservative “moderates” from seeing what is going on and letting the more liberal “moderates” pretend that they don’t see what is going on.

Both sort of moderate insists upon the myth of the homosexual couple who are in every respect, except for sexual difference, just like the ideal heterosexual couple.  They believe in monogamy (of a sort, about which more later).  They simply want Adam and Steve to join Adam and Eve at the altar, in the pews, and in the Sunday-school parents’ meetings.

The leading sodomitical propagandists still speak as if monogamy were their present practice and future goal, which only needs to be given official sanction as a matter of justice and inclusivity and as the natural fruit of our evolving understanding of “the freedom we have in Christ.”  (They are very big on invoking the Lord.)  Hearing them speak of their unions, you could imagine that you were listening to someone describe the world of Mayberry, North Carolina, or the Walton Family, or a picture from the Norman Rockwell collection.

They do not hide the problems, but they find in them more evidence that the Church should do as they demand.  If some of their peers are promiscuous, and promote promiscuity, they claim that these men and women sleep around because they do not have the social supports heterosexual people have and because heterosexual people hate them and teach them to hate themselves.  “Homophobia” drives the homosexual from bed to bed.  Letting him marry in the Church would be a pastoral act, an act of kindness as well as justice.

And so, in public, the homosexualists plead only for the Church’s approval of homosexual marriages.  One might be inclined to assume that they are sincere in this (though I, who reported on the Episcopal Church for 15 years, do not), but they give the game away in the way they speak of themselves.

Roughly 20 years ago, they began to speak of the “lesgay” movement, which, between five and ten years ago, became the “lesbigay” movement.  Shortly after that, it became the “lesbigaytrans” or “lbgt” movement when they added the “transgendered.”  The “transgendered” are those who, for whatever reasons, feel more comfortable living as if they were the opposite sex, even if they don’t want to have themselves surgically remade.

The change from “lesgay” to “lesbigay” meant something more than merely adding another oppressed group to the movement.  The homosexualists assume that you must obey your sexual desires if you are to be true to your “nature,” or “the way God made me.”  That is the reason they identify themselves by their sexual tastes.

Thus, in calling their movement the “lesbigay” movement, they have added to the list of things they want approved a sexuality that does not follow the rules they currently approve in public.  As bisexuals by definition cannot be monogamous if they are to be true to their nature, the propagandists have approved promiscuity without exactly admitting it.  The bisexual being true to his nature has to sleep with at least two people, one man and one woman, without settling on one or the other.

The “moderates” ignore this evidence that their homosexualist allies intend more than lifelong unions.  I think they ignore it for two reasons, as I suggested already: First, some of them are genuinely dim and really do think a reasonable line can be drawn at homosexual marriage; and, second, many of them are much more liberal in these matters than they want to be seen as being in public.

And they have a logical problem as well as a political problem.  Both must know (at some level) that, if they object to bisexuality, they will have to object to homosexuality, as all the reasons for approving the second justify the first as well.  We have the same reasons for thinking sex ought to be restricted to a partner of the opposite sex that we have for thinking that it ought to be restricted to one partner.

My own view is that many homo-sexu-alists really do want monogamy, of a sort.—the serial monogamy now standard among even conservative congregations, where remarriage after divorce is not thought in any way a problem—even when a man leaves his wife and children for a much younger, shapelier woman.  All they want is a series with more entries or episodes packed into a much shorter amount of time.  They have the same idea of sex and commitment as do many conservatives, only they have changed the time-span and the limit.

On top of which, the homosexualists are only asking the Episcopal Church to do with Scripture and Tradition and the rest of the Anglican Communion what it did in 1976 in approving the ordination of women—which 85 percent of the conservatives approve wholeheartedly.  They (the moral innovators) are genuinely surprised that the conservatives continue to condemn one and cheer the other.  They are, after all, the theological products of the Church the conservatives helped to create, sustain, and nurture.