Reverend Peter J. Gomes

The Reverend Peter J. Gomes has died. He was 68 reports the New York Times. Gomes, a Harvard minister, theologian, and author who came out a generation ago and became one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices against intolerance, passed away Monday in Boston. One can read into the Bible almost any interpretation of morality, Mr. Gomes was fond of saying after coming out, for its passages had been used to defend slavery and the liberation of slaves, to support racism, anti-Semitism and patriotism, to enshrine a dominance of men over women, and to condemn homosexuality as immoral. Gomes was a black Baptist preacher, and for much of his life a conservative Republican celebrity who wrote books about the Pilgrims, published volumes of sermons and presided at weddings and funerals of the rich and famous, offering the benediction at President Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural, and delivering the National Cathedral sermon at the inaugural of President George H. W. Bush. At Harvard, Mr. Gomes was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the School of Divinity and the Pusey Minister of Memorial Church, a nondenominational center of Christian life on campus. For decades, he was among the first and the last to address undergraduates, greeting arriving freshman with a sermon on hallowed traditions, and advising graduating seniors about the world beyond Harvard. In 1991, he appeared before an angry crowd of students, faculty members, and administrators protesting homophobic articles in a conservative campus magazine whose distribution had led to a spate of harassment and slurs against gay men and lesbians on campus. Mr. Gomes announced that he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay.” Months later, Gomes told the Washington Post that “I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia. I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays,” authoring an Op-Ed piece in 1992 for the New York Times that read in part “Religious fundamentalism is dangerous because it cannot accept ambiguity and diversity and is therefore inherently intolerant. Such intolerance, in the name of virtue, is ruthless and uses political power to destroy what it cannot convert.”