GENE ROBINSON was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, and graduated from the University of the South with a B.A. in American studies and history. He completed the MDiv degree in 1973 at the General Theological Seminary in New York, and was ordained deacon and then priest, serving as curate at Christ Church, Ridgewood, NJ. Robinson is a Senior Fellow at American Progress. He was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003, having served as Canon to the Ordinary (assistant to the bishop) for nearly eighteen years.

From the Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church, the first openly gay person elected (in 2003) to the historic episcopate and the world's leading religious spokesperson for gay rights and gay marriage-a groundbreaking book that lovingly and persuasively makes the case for same-sex marriage using a commonsense, reasoned, religious argument, made by someone who holds the religious text of the Bible to be holy and sacred and the ensuing two millennia of church history to be relevant to the discussion, equally familiar with the secular and political debate going on in America today, and for whom same-sex marriage is a personal issue; Robinson was married to a woman for two decades and is a father of two children and has been married to a man for the last four years of a twenty-three-year relationship.