Former Senator John Danforth gives U. S. News and World Report his take on the recent events in the Episcopal Church.
In the current conflict within the Anglican Communion, Episcopalians are sometimes portrayed by those who opposed the Church’s stance on women’s rights and gay rights as captives of the cultural left. Here we have a former Republican senator, key supporter of Clarence Thomas, and former member of the Bush administration defending that Church against radicals to his right. Danforth is at home in the Episcopal Church. As was Gerald Ford. As is the first President Bush, who recently gave the keynote speech at the kick-off dinner for one of our parishes’ capitol campaigns. As is the current President Bush, who invited one of our rectors to give the invocation at his second inauguration.
These men are nobody’s liberals. And neither Linda Lingle, the Republican governor of Hawaii, nor Virginia Congressman Frank R. Wolf will ever be mistaken for a left winger. Yet both have returned campaign contributions from Howard Ahmanson, sugar daddy of the Anglican right, rather than being publicly associated with his views on homosexuality, creationism and global warming.
There is a party in our current conflict that is both captive and tool of extremists and ideologues, but it is the group now affiliating itself with Archbishop Peter Akinola and his newly-forming Church of the Human Rights Violation.