As far as I, and I suspect you, know, is that the only thing that argues for M Smith being "gay" is the fact that he never married. He was originally an Episcopal priest for a while, but they, along with Anglicans generally, are free to marry. He was not "defrocked" or cast out of the priesthood for some misdeed. He simply asked to be released from his vow, and this was granted.rakovsky wrote:No, but if someone is a black nationalist and then "coincidentally" "discovers' a lost 2nd c. document reasonably but uniquely alluding that Jesus was black, the "coincidence" seems to me an argument against its legitimacy.Secret Alias wrote:So the only way a person could write a story about black people is if the story writer was black?
J D Crossan was a Roman Catholic priest (the non-marring kind, although priests of some RC rites actually can marry) who asked to be relieved of his vow, but he did that to marry a nun, who also asked to be relieved. I have never heard of anyone claiming to be Smith's lover, male or female.
Now Smith (M. not Ben) *was* even homelier than me, if that is even possible, so perhaps like the adolescent who redirects his/her unrequited sexual passions into guitar or piano playing, Smith redirected his into scholarship. Of course, by that analogy, I should have been a modern Lou Gehrig, but I had to settle for being Charlie Brown's favorite baseball player, Joe Shlabotnik, demoted to the minor leagues for a .004 batting average.
What you seem to be doing, rakovski, is simply assume that Smith was actively promoting homosexuality. You are going to have to come up with something better than "everyone knows ..." My orthopedic surgeon is happy to be a Trump supporter, and whenever I visit him he talks about Obama as if he wore an Arafat style head scarf and routinely carried an AK-47 with him, as he was "the most activist president ever in the history of the universe." Really? If you ask blacks (I have) he was not an activist at all.
DCH