First Divorced Openly Gay Bishop

There is truly no end to the "firsts" that Gene Robinson can achieve. He is now the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Church to announce he is divorcing his husband. Unless I have missed one. I guess it's possible I've missed one. Every day the Episcopalians come up with some new "first" to stagger us all with. I guess, fond as I am of our American cousins, it would be nice if they stopped being relentlessly progressive, edgy, and creative for a week and focused on telling everybody about Jesus. They may think it's the same thing - personally I reckon they merely overlap.

There's nothing worse than people smirking about somebody else's sadness, however. I hope I've skirted round the smirking there. Because I actually think the breakdown of a committed relationship is a sad thing. But for those that might feel like a smirk -  it's not like, in the days since Henry VIII redefined marriage to mean whatever the king felt like, and then the Divorce Act redefined marriage to be not so indissoluble, heterosexual couples haven't been divorced as well. There's few people, of whatever genital combination, that go into marriage expecting it to be terminated. We are all, in the marital stakes, optimists. About a half of married couples of whatever combination of chromosomes will be divorced. It's a shame, but it's a fact. And smirking about a broken gay relationship won't suddenly fix all those straight ones.