I went to St. Olaf College, which according to its web page has "a vibrant faith tradition," and perhaps mainly for that reason I was once acquainted with a lot of people who are now clergymen. Sometimes I google the name of one of them and end up reading about how gay people are an abomination to God and that those who disagree are "holy blasphemers," et cetera, et cetera. I mean this kind of thing. In the interest of balance, I should report that a recent exercise in "googling the clergy" revealed that not all are wholly crazy.
Bill Gafkjen was a year ahead of me in high school and the best pitcher on our baseball team. The second best pitcher was our all-around best player, so when Bill couldn't pitch, it usually meant there was an opening in our infield, which I got to fill. We would have been a better team with two Gafkjens. He is now the bishop of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and it appears to me that the Lutherans would be better off with another one of him, too. You can tell he is a decent fellow by the spite he elicits from people who aren't. Bill, apparently, is one of those whose general outlook on homosexual people is "liberal, not Biblical." As far as I know, Jesus never breathed a syllable on the question, and he also seems on occasion a little light in the loafers himself--never marrying, never gobbing spit on the poor, never exhibiting an ounce of interest in NASCAR. But I should let the fighting Lutherans duke it out. I just want to say hooray for Bill for not being on the spittle-soaked, foam-flecked side.
When I was about twelve or thirteen, I played on a town baseball team coached by an older teen-ager, Cooper Wiggen. Coop is now the pastor at a Methodist Church a couple miles from my home in south Minneapolis. Googling his name, I discover that he is married to another Methodist minister, Elizabeth Macaulay, and that both of them have, at some risk to their careers, loudly supported same-sex marriage. You can see them interviewed about their views here.
I don't know why ballplayers seem to make the sanest churchmen.
