Gay Humanist James McGreevey on Universal Redemption in HBO's 'Fall to Grace' by Alexandra Pelosi

James McGreevey, This Side of Redemption New York Times

As it happens, this $1.4 million retreat is home to one of Plainfield’s — if not New Jersey’s — most notable couples. James McGreevey is best known as the self-described “gay American” who, threatened with blackmail by a lover whom he’d placed on the state payroll, resigned as New Jersey’s governor in 2004. His partner, Mark O’Donnell, is an Australian financier with a taste for modern art and adventure travel.

Bunnies or no, Easter is about the Passion of Christ in this household. Once a Catholic weighted with shame over his homosexuality, Mr. McGreevey, 55, has made his way back to God. After he stepped down in Trenton, the shock sent him for a month to the Meadows, a rehabilitation center in Arizona. Relentlessly excavating his heart and soul, he later went into psychotherapy and resurrected the calling he said he had felt since he was an altar boy in Carteret, N.J.

Now an Episcopalian with a degree in divinity from the General Theological Seminary, he’s embracing the Lord’s work with the same fervor with which he once pursued politics. Though the Newark diocese denied his bid for the priesthood last year, inciting another painful round of headlines about his past, he says he is at peace.

Anne here, on my to Lancaster, to tend our beautiful new shops at Building Character. I’m struck by this startingly beautiful article about former governor Jim McGreevey and his life after his resignation as governor of New Jersey.

The timing of the article during the Easter season and after two days of US Supreme Court hearings on gay marriage is simply perfect. 

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan stunned millions yesterday when she read aloud from the 1996 Report to Congress that accompanied the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act known as DOMA. The Atlantic shares the story

Individual rights are under attack in America from the right-wing who seeks to insure that America remains a purely Christian nation. Many seek a theocracy for America, no different thaa Iran’s — except that it is Christian. Gay rights and women’s rights are the clear target the right-wing who seek to govern both group according to a Biblical code. This is not the vision of America that most of its citizens embrace. 

Noted Kagan: “We have a whole series of cases which suggest the following … that when Congress targets a group that is not everybody’s favorite group in the world, that we look at those cases with some —­ even if they’re not suspect — with some rigor to say, do we really think that Congress was doing this for uniformity reasons, or do we think that Congress’s judgment was infected by dislike, by fear, by animus, and so forth? I guess the question that this statute raises, this statute that does something that’s really never been done before, is whether that sends up a pretty good red flag that that’s what was going on.”

McGreevey and his partner Mark O’Donnell will be featured in a HBO documentary tonight March 28 on HBO in Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary ‘Fall to Grace’.  In an equally lovely twist, Alexandra Pelosi is House Minority Speaker and champion of human rights Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.