Here's kind of a disturbing story — disturbing because the charges involved sound so utterly phony. The full story from the AP is available here and the opening goes something like this…
Aug. 5, 2003 — A clergyman seeking to become the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church was apparently cleared of 11th-hour allegations of misconduct, a church spokesman said Tuesday. The bishop leading the inquiry into the Rev. V. Gene Robinson will report later Tuesday on the results of his preliminary investigation and a vote will be taken, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold said in a brief statement Tuesday. Allegations emerged Monday that Robinson had inappropriately touched a man and that he is connected to a group whose Web site can indirectly link users to pornography.
That last charge, the thing about the website, is one of those charges you make against someone when you want to attack them and have no genuine evidence of wrongdoing. Any website can indirectly link you to pornography. If I post a link here to Google and you go there and enter a so-called "dirty word," you can be at porn in two hops from this page. On my other site, I used to have a link to a page of movie trivia but the owners of that page let it expire and the web address was bought by a porn site. So for six months, or until someone tipped me off, I had a link that would have taken you to porn had you clicked it. Unless someone posts a direct, deliberate link to another site with something offensive (like this link), it is fraudulent to claim they're somehow involved with it or tainted by the smut. In fact, it's a cynical fraud because it's designed to drum up outrage among people who don't understand how the Internet works.
(To make matters worse, both Robinson and the founder of the website in question deny the accused reverend had anything to do with the website. Even if he'd run it, that would not mean he was connected to pornography…but look how distant the sin is from the accused person. He was connected to a group — actually, he claims to have founded it — which has a website via which someone could indirectly link to pornography. This is the worst thing they could find to say about this gay reverend to attack him?)
Well, actually the worst is the claim that that Reverend Robinson "inappropriately touched a man." That sounds like he grabbed someone's genitalia, probably in private, and if he did, then it's probably a gross miscarriage that he was cleared. But according to this story and others, the alleged touching was of "the man's shoulder, upper back and bicep" at a public event. Bishop Gordon Scruton investigated the claim of a man named Lewis and here, according to this account, is what the investigation revealed…
Scruton said he spoke with Lewis by phone Monday afternoon and Lewis told him that, at a public church event in November 1999, Robinson "put his left hand on the individual's arm and his right hand on the individual's upper back" as Robinson answered a question Lewis had asked. Scruton said the other encounter occurred when Lewis turned to make a comment to Robinson and the clergyman "touched the individual's forearm and back while responding with his own comment."
Does that sound like a sexual assault to you? He touched the man's arm while they were having a conversation! If that's true, I was assaulted about fifty times at the Comic-Con in San Diego. Sounds to me like someone is very homophobic and that the earlier newspaper account should have been more explicit. Without that little detail, doesn't the phrase "inappropriately touched a man" give you the wrong impression? Especially as part of a investigation into serious misconduct?
Bottom line here is that someone was trying to smear a gay clergyman who was about to ascend to bishop. They took two utterly harmless facts about him and spun them as offenses serious enough to suggest, as some have the last few days, that he resign and go away. Pundits like Fred Barnes have been out there flogging it as a scandal that demands action. I'm going to take what seems to me like the only appropriate action. I'm going to stop reading Fred Barnes.
And by the way, the website on which you can read Fred Barnes' piece is owned by Rupert Murdoch's company, which also has a controlling interest in the satellite provider, DirecTV. DirecTV broadcasts real hardcore pornography into homes all across America.