Sunnydale Recycling

Two Lives, Two Secrets

Mar 9 at 11:11pm by max

On March 3rd, the Times had two articles about recently deceased religious leaders:

Robert Skolrood: “Douglas Martin, Robert Skolrood, 79, Argued Religion Cases. Skolrood was an attorney who represented right-wing religious groups:

• He was the executive director of the National Legal Foundation, started by Pat Robertson in 1985;
• Represented “Bridget Mergens, a high school senior in Omaha whose proposal to start an after-schoo Bible class was rejected by her principal. In 1990, the United States Supreme Court ruled that if groups started by and led by students were permitted, religious groups could not be excluded.” (This ruling, in and of itself, seems reasonable).
• In 1987, Skolrood persuaded a “federal district court judge to ban 44 books from Alabama public schools on the ground that they promoted agodless, humanistic religion. The ruling, reversed on appeal, put ’secular humanism’ on the same constitutional footing as conventional religions.” Got that? Atheism and agnosticism are actually religions, even though they definie themselves, essentially, as non-religions.
• Skolrood was active in a number of efforts to prevent gay people from receiving equal protection.

The general rule in journalism, or so I’ve always understood it this way, is that the most important details are reported, or referred to, in the beginning of the piece. But in graf 17 another dimension of Skolrood’s life is revealed to us:

In 1980, he moved to Tulsa, Okla., to teach at Oral Roberts University Law School. After a year of teaching, he became Mr. Roberts’s personal lawyer. He left in 1985 to go to Virginia Beach to help start the National Legal Foundation.

In 2002, when he was semi-retired, Mr. Skolrood was arrested on charges of uttering obscenities and making sexual advances toward a male undercover police officer at an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway. He denied all the charges at a trial before a federal magistrate in Roanoke, Va., but he pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and paid a $125 fine.

So - at least from the Times’ account of his life, here’s a man who spent a lot of his time making life difficult for gay people at the same time he was having sex with other men on the down low.

On the other hand, the Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr. has just been outed by Honor Moore, the oldest of his nine children. For at least the last decades of his life Moore had a hidden gay existence.S So, on the front page of the section is this article by Paul Vitello, “A Bishop Unveiled God’s Secrets While Keeping His Own,” about Honor Moore’s article in the The New Yorker.

Link to Honor Moore’s article in The New Yorker here; link to audio interview here.

What these men had in common was a closeted gay life. Moore eventually told his second wife, who told his nine children. We don’t know who Skolrod confided in.

But we can tell you a little bit more about Paul Moore. From the Wikipedia entry:

Paul Moore, Jr., was a graduate of St. Paul’s School and Yale University, where, like his father before him, he was a member of Wolf’s Head, a secret society at Yale College.He left Yale to join the Marine Corps. He was a highly decorated Marine Corps captain, a veteran of the Guadalcanal Campaign during World War Two earning the Navy Cross, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart [1]. Returning home after the War, Moore was ordained in 1949 after graduating from the General Theological Seminary in New York City. He was then named rector of Grace van Vorst Church, an inner city parish in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he served from 1949 to 1957. There he began his career as a social activist, protesting inner city housing conditions and racial discrimination. He and his colleagues reinvigorated their inner city parish and were celebrated in the Church for their efforts. In 1957, he was named Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis, where he served until his appointment as Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., in 1964. During his time in Washington he became nationally known as an advocate for civil rights and an opponent of the Vietnam War. He knew Martin Luther King, Jr., and marched with him in Selma and elsewhere. In 1970, he was named as coadjutor and successor to Bishop Horace Donegan in New York City. He was installed as Bishop of the Diocese of New York in 1972 and held that position until 1989.

Bishop Moore was widely known for his liberal activism. Throughout his career he spoke out against homelessness and racism. He was an effective advocate for cities, once calling the corporations abandoning New York “rats leaving a sinking ship.” He was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain an openly homosexual woman as a priest in the church. In his book, Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), he defended his position by arguing that many priests were homosexuals but few with the courage to acknowledge it. His liberal political views were coupled with fierce traditionalism when it came to the liturgy and even the creed. In his writings and sermons he sometimes described himself as ‘born again’, referring to his awakening to a fervent Christocentric faith as a boarding school student.

By birth, by inherited wealth, by friendships and career success, Bishop Moore was an acknowledged member of what was often called ‘the Liberal Establishment’, a group that included, among others, Kingman Brewster and Cyrus Vance, along with many other graduates of Yale College. He wrote three books, The Church Reclaims the City (1965), Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), and, after his retirement, Presences: A Bishop’s Life in the City (1997), a memoir of his life.

In 1944, while in the Marine Corps, Bishop Moore married Jenny McKean, a daughter of Bohemian privilege reared on the North Shore of Boston and educated at Madeira School, Vassar College and Barnard. (Her mother was Margarett Sargent McKean, a noted painter in the Ashcan School and a follower of George Luks.) Together they had nine children (and, at his death, many grandchildren). Jenny McKean Moore published a well reviewed account of their decade together in the slums of Jersey City under the title, The People on Second Street (1968). During that time the family lived in the tenement-like rectory of Grace van Vorst Church on Second Street in Jersey City (now called in his honor, Bishop Paul Moore Place).