Katharine Jefferts Schori for President

It used to be that the gays merely caused popular disgust. Then in the Bush-Cheney era -- made possible by the Republicans’ ability to capitalize on our potential to incite the aforementioned popular disgust -- Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and their conservative Christian minions blamed us in quick succession for 9/11, the Southeast Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the U.S. military's mounting death toll in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Accustomed as we are to being fingered by religious leaders for all manner of secular cataclysm, it seems an extraordinary turnabout that now, even as we figure prominently in an ecclesiastical crisis, Episcopal leaders, far from ringing us up for the damages, either downplay our role in the fight or stand up for our honor.

When its clergy and lay members voted on December 8 to secede from the U.S. Episcopal Church -- by a dizzying margin of 172–22 -- the diocese of San Joaquin in central California became the first entire diocese to leave the national church in its 200-year-plus history. (Over the last several years, more than 50 individual conservative congregations nationwide have also split, and three additional dioceses have taken initial steps toward secession but have not yet formally broken ties: Fort Worth, Texas; Quincy, Ill.; and Pittsburgh.) Even during the Civil War, when congregations were bitterly divided along North-South lines, the Episcopal Church remained unified in dogma and practice -- whatever the animus between its Union and Confederate sympathizers.

Fissures leading to the current theological fault follow long-standing and less singular differences than those stirred by the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, the first openly gay -- and actively partnered -- priest to be elected bishop in the Episcopal Church, the U.S. province of the 77 million–member worldwide Anglican Communion. (The Episcopal Church stood up for us as early as 1976, when clergy at its General Convention affirmed gays and lesbians as “children of God” who deserve acceptance and equal treatment in spiritual as well as secular life. The church backed up the resolution by ordaining its first openly gay priest, Ellen Barrett, in 1977.) But even if it’s foolish to think the gays could single-handedly trump slavery and states’ rights as fodder for secessionist ire, we once again find ourselves the cause célèbre in a war over “values” and who gets to delineate them.

The breakaway congregations and the 8,800-member San Joaquin diocese -- among whose 47 congregations only around a half dozen are expected to remain loyal to the Episcopal Church -- insist that their exit isn’t all about the gay issue, which San Joaquin bishop John-David M. Schofield, who led the secession movement, likened to a newfangled fad within the national church, an “in thing” that the hierarchy will soon grow tired of and allow to go fallow as a child might a Chia Pet.