Gay bishop backs Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood should target “people of faith” to promote abortion rights and comprehensive sex education, the Episcopal Church’s first openly homosexual bishop told a gathering in the District yesterday.

“In this last election we see what the ultimate result of divorce from communities of faith will do to us,” New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson said during Planned Parenthood’s fifth annual prayer breakfast.

“Our defense against religious people has to be a religious defense. … We must use people of faith to counter the faith-based arguments against us,” he said.

Bishop Robinson’s comments at Planned Parenthood’s national leadership conference took aim at traditional interpretations of the Bible.

“We have allowed the Bible to be taken hostage, and it is being wielded by folks who would use it to hit us over the head. We have to take back those Scriptures,” he said. “You know, those stories are our stories. I tell this to lesbian folk all the time: The story of freedom in Exodus is our story. … That’s my story, and they can’t have it.

“This current administration notwithstanding, the world is not black and white,” Bishop Robinson said. “We need to teach people about nuance, about holding things in tension, that this can be true and that can be true, and somewhere between is the right answer. It’s a very adult way of living, you know.

“What an unimaginative God it would be if God only put one meaning in any verse of Scripture,” he said.

Mr. Robinson left his wife and two young daughters in 1986 and moved in with another man. He was elected bishop by state and clergy delegates in June 2003 and affirmed by the national convention two months later.

Abortion, he said yesterday, is “not just a matter between a woman and her body. This is not like removing a mole. On the other hand, no one should interfere with a woman’s right to choose.”

The Episcopal Church stated its position on abortion in a resolution during its 71st General Convention in 1994: “While we acknowledge that in this country it is the legal right of every woman to have a medically safe abortion, as Christians we believe strongly that if this right is exercised, it should be used only in extreme situations.

“We emphatically oppose abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience,” the resolution states.

Planned Parenthood officials said they do not disclose publicly statistics on the number of abortions they perform, but provide that data to the National Institutes of Health. Statistics were not available yesterday.

However, the group performed 244,628 abortions last year, and has performed 3.5 million abortions since 1970, according to David Bereit, national director of Stop Planned Parenthood (Stopp).

Stopp espouses the belief that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder.

Mr. Bereit said his organization is “not going to allow Planned Parenthood to hijack Christianity.”

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