Feb 29, 2008  |  By: Robert A. Bernstein  | COMMENTS     

SOME 3,000 GAY and straight activists cheered as Lutheran Minister Bob Mordhorst stood in the spotlight, his bald pate glistening.

The occasion was the Human Rights Campaign’s 10th annual dinner in the D.C. Convention Center. Seated next to Rev. Mordhorst, his daughter Heidi glowed with pleasure. On the stage, Heidi’s partner, Fiona Grant, the event’s co-chair, had just raised her glass in a toast to Mordhorst for traveling the long spiritual journey from bewildered parent to open supporter of gay equality.

Now, Fiona said, Rev. Mordhorst had no compunction about “preaching on diversity and talking publicly” about Heidi and Fiona and their two children — his and wife Lila’s only two grandchildren, born to Heidi via donor insemination.

Still, at Baltimore’s Emmanuel Lutheran Church, where “Pastor Bob” served 19 years until 2002, the subject of homosexuality to this day has never been openly discussed. In nearly two decades in the pulpit there, he never raised the subject of sexual orientation or same-sex unions, either privately or from the pulpit.

It was only after his retirement from the Baltimore post, when he became a part-time minister in a more progressive congregation in Silver Spring, that Pastor Bob began to preach diversity and speak candidly about his devotion to his daughter and grandchildren. His decades of ducking the issue exemplify a syndrome that Martin Luther King, Jr., in another era with regard to an earlier civil rights movement, dubbed “the appalling silence of the good.”

Rev. King of course had reference to the reluctance of white clergy to openly declare their support for black civil rights in the 1960s. But precisely the same kinds of pressures — perceived danger to their jobs and pensions, aversion to confrontation, fear of congregational wrath — are today squelching what would otherwise amount to massive clerical support of gay equality and gay marriage.

While I had long assumed this to be the case, my suspicions have now been confirmed by discussions with dozens of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy.

Not surprisingly, I have found very few of those silent supporters willing to speak with me. By definition, it’s something they’re loathe to talk about. But I did discover significant numbers of courageous clergy who are speaking out — and who often express severe impatience with colleagues who refuse to reveal openly that their faith values support gay equality and gay marriage. A few examples:

• Rt. Rev. Rusty Smith of D.C., a former Catholic priest, now a bishop of the Evangelical Anglican Church of America, says “mainstream denominations are full of ministers who know that gay inequality isn’t right but don’t speak their secrets out loud. The fear factor is just horrible among clergy.”
• Harry Knox, who heads HRC’s Religion and Faith Program, denounces clerics who “have made an idol of their pension. They say, ‘I’ve got to take care of my family.’ I tell them, ‘Well, I’ve got to take care of my family, too, and what you’re saying to me is that yours matters more than mine.’”
• Dennis Hahle is a retired Evangelical Lutheran minister now living in Littleton, North Carolina with his wife Jeannie. They have a gay son and say they know numerous colleagues similarly situated but only privately supportive. And their own local church’s atmosphere is so repressive that Jeannie says, “It feels as though we’re in the closet ourselves, because we can’t really share in our congregation the way we’d want to.”

But perhaps the most meaningful comment is that of Pastor Bob Mordhorst, explaining how in 2003 — 12 years after learning his daughter and Fiona were partners — he finally resolved the anguishing conflict between the teachings of his church and of his heart.

Now, he laughs as he confesses, “God spoke to me through the Massachusetts Supreme Court.”

In its ruling mandating gay marriage there, he explains: “[The justices] talk about the fundamental human need for intimacy. And that was the final turning point for me to full acceptance of my daughter and her partner’s relationship and the intimacy it entailed. And I came to that as a theological conclusion.”

Amen.