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There may be one thing even more difficult than coming out of the closet for many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, said the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop.
And that's coming out as religious.
Yet reclaiming faith is vital to the success of the gay-rights movement, V. Gene Robinson told Utahns this week at a Salt Lake City fundraiser for the nonprofit group Equality Utah.
"We need to lay claim to the fact that we've been able to put our sexuality together with our spirituality in a way that enlivens us and nourishes us," said Robinson, whose landmark 2003 ordination as bishop of the New Hampshire Diocese drew cheers in some quarters and scorn in others throughout the faith community.
"We have let the religious right take the Bible hostage," he said, "and it's time we took it back."
In a speech meant to remind LGBT Utahns of "great progress" in recent decades and to inspire them for the fight ahead, Robinson likened the movement to the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and '70s.
In both cases, he said, real change happened only after allies -- whites with blacks and men with women -- joined the fight.
"When straight allies are joining us in our fight, then we can really make some progress," an optimistic Robinson told the 1,200 gathered at the Calvin Rampton Salt Palace Convention Center.
Homophobia is waning, he said, and there is a "vast, movable middle" in
The Allies Dinner 2009 fundraiser honored those -- including one church, the South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society -- who are helping to secure rights for LGBT people. Others given awards were Salt Lake County Councilwoman Jenny Wilson and partners Carol Gnade and Lorraine Miller.
Working from within faith communities is important, Robinson said, because "90 percent, at least, of the oppression that you and I face as LGBT people comes from the Abrahamic faiths -- from Judaism, Islam and Christianity."
Robinson predicted The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- as well as other churches -- will change its position.
"Pretty soon," Robinson said, "even the LDS Church is going to realize that no one under 30 is interested in joining a church that discriminates against us."
Those Mormon families enduring the conflict between what their church teaches and how many of their loved ones live will influence their leaders, he said. "They are going to wake up. They are going to see that the compassion they believe in extends to all of God's children."
While the LDS Church was at the forefront of advocating California's Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage last year, the church increasingly encourages compassion for those with same-sex attraction.
A 2006 church pamphlet stresses that such attraction is not sinful, although acting on it is. The church less often advocates marriage as a "cure" for homosexuality and is more open than in the past to the contention that many gay and lesbian people are born with such sexuality.
Last year, the church said it would not oppose some basic rights, such as hospital visitation and housing nondiscrimination, for same-sex couples.
Robinson said he is confident LGBT people eventually will have full inclusion in all of society, including in churches, synagogues and mosques.
"In the end," he said, "we can keep doing this work because we know how it's going to end."
He encouraged LGBT people to lives of joy, "fabulousness" and integrity so that no one can deny "the eternal light that is in each one of us.
"No matter the setbacks, the costs, the price we pay," Robinson said, "we are inexorably moving to a vision of the culture and of our religious institutions which is closer to God's [vision]."
