Perhaps the most striking thing about the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Jamaica is the deliberate fear mongering engaged in by men like Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop Gregory Cameron, the deputy general secretary of the Anglican Communion. At one news conference after another they suggest that the Communion will rupture if the anti-gay measures embedded in the proposed Anglican Covenant and the report of the Windsor Continuation Group are not embraced and enforced. While they might dispute the characterization, the choice these religious leaders are putting before the Communion is a simple one: bigotry or death. Either the Communion embraces open-ended moratoria on the blessing of same-sex relationships and the consecration of gay bishops and a set of disciplinary procedures to punish wayward provinces and individual bishops or the sky falls.
Enjoy this Eddie Izzard routine while you still can. In ignoring the rampant bigotry espoused by some many in the Anglican Communion, and focusing instead on denying gay Christians access to marital blessings and membership in the episcopacy, Williams, Cameron and their allies have made it imminently clear that unlike Izzard’s softhearted churchmen, they actually are willing to inflict pain on designated scapegoats for the sake of centralizing authority in the Anglican Communion.