Episcopal Church reverses stance on gay bishops..

...this is hugely disappointing....they caved to the right...this will satisfy no one.....'restraint' indeed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5104102.stm


The US Episcopal Church has agreed to "exercise restraint" in appointing gay bishops in an effort to prevent its expulsion from the Anglican communion.
The communion has been in turmoil since the 2003 election of the gay bishop Gene Robinson in New Hampshire.

The new resolution is a watered-down version of a proposal, rejected on Tuesday, to stop electing gay bishops.

The compromise will not satisfy traditionalists who regard gay sex as sinful, says the BBC's Robert Piggott.

The traditionalist majority within the Anglican Church had been calling for stricter measures against the ordination of gay bishops.

It had also demanded curbs on church blessings for same-sex couples.

Divisive issue

The non-binding resolution, approved on Wednesday at the US Episcopal Church's convention in Ohio, stops far short of meeting their demands.

The resolution says the church must "exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion".

Earlier, the outgoing Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold, and the woman who becomes his successor in November, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, had appealed for a compromise.

They called for the convention to show it recognised just how divisive the issue of gay bishops was for Anglicans.

And they wonder why so many people are turned off by organized religion.

that us queer folk really for the most part don't think what qualifies us as queer is what we do or don't do with our gonads. At least, speaking for myself, I don't run around 24/7 thinking "I gots to have me some bootay". We think what qualifies us as queer is loving someone of the same GENDER. Everything else is entertainment.

All these dickhead religious prudes - all they ever think about is sex sex sex, everybody else's sex. They're the people who give sex a bad name. You don't hear about them addressing two people of the same gender living together who don't have sex as sinful. Or two people of opposite gender living together and not having sex as sinful. Or people who have sex for entertainment and pleasure only if they're of the opposite gender.

Nope, it's all about dude on dude or chick on chick nookie with those perverts. I wish they'd just take up knitting or something vastly more interesting than us gay folk. :shrug:

just sayin'

it just pisses me off because at my episcopal church, the assoc. pastor is an 'out' lesbian in a committed longterm relationship and she's about the best pastor me and my family have had, and i was raised in the church. i worry this will make her leave our church, even though the congregation supports her unanimously...

...among that crowd. Not orientation, but acts. One regular poster to one of the conservative Anglican blogs I scan misses no oppportunity to decry to horrors of "shagging manbutt" and "fecalgenital perversion."

transformed into a ken doll and my partner too, I would still live with him and I would still love him and I would still consider myself unapologetically gay.

So now the question is, if that really did happen how does anyone know or prove that we're actively engaging in bumping smoothies or whatever it is that gay Ken dolls do? And why on earth would it matter?

It's an important idea, because if they're concerned about "sex" instead of "gender" then that is consitutionally a private matter. We don't have heterosexual people prove that they are heterosexual. Why would we make gay people prove they're gay?

Living together of the same gender isn't enough, apparently. They want to see PROOF of manbutt shagging for whatever bizarre reason.

It's just an odd odd thing to try to use to establish a class of humanity. I think they'd probably be happier sticking to skin color or something easier.

it really throws em for a loop.

...but the Episcopal Church (TEC) hasn't actually reversed its stance on gay bishops. It passed a resolution urging dioceses not to elect bishops whose "manner of living" might cause affront to other members of the Anglican Communion. This is a response to the Windsor Report, a document calling for TEC to "repent" of ordaining an openly gay bishop and promise not to do it again. This resolution doesn't do that at all. It urges "caution".

The structure of TEC is very federal -- with a weak "central government" (the General Convention) and strong "states" (the individual dioceses). One bishop, John Chane of Washington, DC has already said he won't be bound by the resolution.

It's a weaselly little resolution and I'd much rather have a clear statement that TEC welcomes all qualified people into its ministry, regardless of sexual orientation. But there are enough moderates who don't want to see a full break with the Anglican Communion (which such a statement would likely cause) and want to continue to talk this issue through.

But this resolution is unlikely to satify the conservatives and, in the process, throws GLBT Episcopalians if not exactly under the bus, at least under a very large Tonka toy or maybe even a Vespa.

The main one being that this resolution is designed to sound like it should be acceptable to the conservative bloc while not actually being acceptable by their standards.

For the past three years, the "sides" in the Anglican Communion have been, figuratively speaking, playing a giant chess game in which the goal is to force the other side to make a move that will hurt their position. With this resolution, ECUSA has basically played an "in-between move," forcing the conservatives to make a choice that will turn out badly for their side either way. It's very smart chess-playing, although, like real chess, pretty much incomprehensible to the average observer.

US Church eases gay bishop stance

LBN rules state that the subject line and article title must match exactly.

Thanks
LBN Moderators

What is really going on here is jockeying for position before the worldwide Anglican conference at Lambeth in two years. It's pretty well recognized that the bloc of conservatives (mainly from Africa and the Far East) is going to demand that the liberals (primarily the U.S. and Canada) be kicked out or they'll walk. Part of the goal of the liberal faction is to ensure that the latter is what happens -- the conservatives march out to form their own denomination, leaving ECUSA and ACC (U.S. and Canada) still in the Anglican Communion.

There was a international commission put together in the wake of ECUSA's ordaining of an openly gay bishop, to see if there was a way of holding the Communion together. It recommended a temporary moratorium on any further gay bishops (the operative word here being temporary). It was the hope of the conservative bloc that the U.S. church would tell them to stick the moratorium where the sun don't shine -- thus allowing them to cast themselves as the "good guys" and those awful liberal Americans as the ones who don't care about the Communion. This would give them the ammunition they needed to kick us out. The goal at this convention was to come up with some sort of consensus statement that would essentially put the matter on hold and force the African and Asian conservatives to either walk out or accept our position as acceptable (not bloody likely, both because they're a bunch of near-fundamentalist hotheads, and because we chose a woman as Presiding Bishop).

Why did a similar statement get rejected yesterday? Because, although the mainstream media didn't report it, the conservatives in the House of Deputies turned the proceedings into a circus, introducing amendment after amendment to the initial "compromise" proposal to make it more and more hard-line, then voting against it themselves, because it was still insufficiently conservative. That's the point of what happened yesterday that everyone missed -- the reason that resolution failed was that the conservatives voted against their own proposal, so as to give them greater justification for forcing ECUSA out and starting their own "official" traditionalist Anglican denomination with recognition from the rest of the Communion.

Now, with the last-minute adoption of this compromise proposal, what is likely to happen over the next two years is:

1) The African/Asian bloc will declare the compromise is "insufficient," and demand that the U.S. bishops be refused inviation to Lambeth.

2) The Archbishop of Canterbury will refuse that demand.

3) The African/Asian bloc will then refuse to attend themselves, and set themselves up as a new denomination, without the backing of the moderate provinces such as England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc., who will in effect side with the U.S. and Canada. Certain U.S. conservative bishops or priests will try to secede and join their dioceses/parishes in with the new traditionalist denomination, but it will be small, badly-organized, and poorly-funded, and won't be able to attract many to leave ECUSA, which will remain the "official" Anglican church in the U.S.

4) The Anglican Communion, having shed its reactionary elements, will be far more able to move in a liberal direction, including the ordination of gays and lesbians, as well as the blessing of same-sex marriage.

In other words, although this seems like a defeat, it actually puts us in a position to come out on top overall. What would have been a disaster would have been for yesterday's legislative action to have been the "final word" of the Convention -- which is why the conservatives wound up voting against their own proposal.

You have to factor in a long history of colonial relationships between the African and Asian churches and Canterbury, where Western sensibilities were forced on the African and Asian churches. When the African churches first heard ECUSA was going to consecrate an openly gay bishop, they asked ECUSA to wait so the matter could be discussed. ECUSA ignored that request and to many in the African church this was another example of the West ignoring them and forcing Western ideas upon them. For some Africans there was the added irony that strong homophobia and gender bigotry was something the colonial missionaries brought to African societies.

I think this compromise was the best ECUSA could do. It doesn't admit wrongdoing, but it does show that ECUSA has listened to the African bishops. However, electing a woman to Presiding Bishop, might be seen by the African church as a huge slight.

I'm not suggesting ECUSA was wrong in electing a woman as Presiding Bishop or in ordaining gay bishops. I am saying that dividing this issue into conservative and liberal grossly oversimplifies the African perspective.

...and there is a huge sub-text of "American unilateralism" at work here.

You've now made all of this make more sense.

i don't get to follow this as closely as i should, even though the church is important to me, and your analysis is helpful.

...wasted no time in condemning the actions of the General Convention as "inadequate" to address the demands of the Windsor Report. This the group that is allied with the "Global South" churches who oppose the ordination of GLBT ministers.

http://www.acn-us.org/archive/2006/06/general-convention-actions-inadequate-bishops-statement.html

Expect the "Global South" primates to follow suit shortly.

The ball will be back in the Archbishop of Canterbury's court next.

My husband and I were elated that the Episcopal church initially (as of yesterday) did not discriminate against gay people and we were going to start attending their church this Sunday (switching from a Roman Catholic -- yea I know :( but it's what I was brought up & am most comfortable with their rituals -- church).

After reading this news I just called and told them that I was extremely disappointed -- we are all children of God no matter our sexual orientation, something which after all is between that individual and God and nobody else-- and as it now stands we were no longer planning to attend their church, ever. I expressed that we did not wish to belong to a church and congregation that so easily bows to a very vocal minority even though they, the church, KNOW what is the right and moral thing to do and worst of all, chickens out.

I also added something I may not should have but I just couldn't help it -- I told them that they should be ashamed of themselves.

Oh well. I'll try not to feel so guilty about it.
They'll live.


Hey, our voices should be heard too, NOT just the Non-Christian/Old-Testamenter fundies!


edit: spelling :/

...for a summary of what's really going on. You might want to reconsider in light of the non-binding nature of the resolution passed.

If you feel you can't attend your local Episcopal Church until everything is exactly spelled out, fair enough, but odds are you're going to miss out on participating in what is likely to be a wonderful spiritual community for a couple of years until the dust settles. Both sides of this issue agree the direction is clear -- the American Episcopal Church has opted for full inclusion of GLBT in the life and ministry of the church and has failed to "repent" of their doing so.

the correct headline is: US Church eases gay bishop stance

...between the two words. The stance that is being "eased" is "Hey! Anglican Communion! We'll ordain whomever we think is best fit to serve." The new stance is "We'll ordain whomever we think is best fit to serve, but we're aware some of choices might create trouble in the family and we'll try to work with you on the issues."

as noted in my post above, the headline and subject line do not match and the OP has not edited the post.

If posters wish to discuss this more, feel free to repost in General Discussion or the Religion and Theology forum.