Retired Bishop Gene Robinson On Being Gay And Loving God

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/14/169066917/retired-bishop-gene-robinson-on-being-gay-and-loving-god

January 10, 2013 3:07 PM

Audio for this story from Fresh Air from WHYY will be available at approximately 5:00 p.m. ET.


Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church, is retiring. He'll go on to work with the Center for American Progress, a progressive research and policy organization, on issues of faith and gay rights.

For many years, it didn't occur to Bishop Gene Robinson — the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church — that he might retire before age 72, the mandatory retirement age for Episcopal bishops. But then, in 2010, Mary Glasspool, who is also openly gay, was elected bishop suffragan in the Diocese of Los Angeles and, for the first time, Robinson reconsidered his retirement plans.

"I thought, 'You know, I don't have to keep doing this,'" he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "'There is an openly gay voice in the House of Bishops and is there something else that I would really like to do? And perhaps that God is calling me to do?' And that answer came back, 'Yes,' and so ... I announced that I would retire at the end of 2012."

Robinson, 65, retired from his position of bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire on January 5. He and his husband Mark will be leaving the state where Robinson has lived and worked since 1975 for Washington, D.C., where Robinson will be working with the Center for American Progress, a progressive research and policy organization, on issues of faith and gay rights.

"I've long been really intrigued with what is the ... proper role of faith and religion in public life," he says. "How do we address the issues that face us as a nation and what might the church, the synagogue, the mosque have to say to those issues, and what's the proper way of making that input into this larger discussion?"

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