What’s the difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals? Andrew Sullivan remembers his own wedding and says, after the California Supreme Court ruling last May, that American culture and law are at last acknowledging that there is none.
So, it’s not about schism, they said repeatedly as GAFCON got underway, and as it wraps up, one emerging line of thought is that it certainly isn’t about schism, nor is it about homosexuality nor even about holding fast to scripture: It’s about power. George Pitcher, writing in the Telegraph, opines that some bishops might be feeling a bit duped at this point if they thought otherwise.
The Guardian has an editorial that says that if Anglican unity is to be maintained, it cannot be for its own sake. Stephen Bates says that those taking part in the conference in Jerusalem are united only by the one thing they all hate.
There are two ways to see the legal marriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. One is as the start of something radical: an experiment that jeopardizes millennia of accumulated social patrimony. The other is as the end of something radical: an experiment in which gay people were told that they could have all the sex and love they could find, but they could not even think about marriage.
Jimmy Doyle gives testimony about his coming to the Episcopal Church so that he may follow Jesus as the gay man he is.
Natalie Hanman asks which comes first, gender equality or religious liberty? Can gender equality can become the law of the land in Great Britain if there is an exception for religious institutions?
Andrew Pierce, writing in The Telegraph, wonders what it will take for the Archbishop of Canterbury to denounce the public bigotry of the Archbishop of Nigeria.
The Virginia case could have implications reaching far beyond these churches in Virginia. Other denominations could be affected if secular courts start making decisions about church governance. And what happens once we start down that slippery slope? This is the focus of an editorial from a newspaper based in Tidewater, Va.
The Newstatesman (UK) has three articles today under the heading “Belief is Back.” Mary Warnock, a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s advisory group on medical ethics writes: ‘ It is the role of legislators to be consequentialists. They must not ask, “What does my religion teach about this measure?” but “Will society benefit from it in the empirical world?” ‘
The division, however, is not really between conservatives and liberals at all. It is much more serious than that. It is a division between, first, those who are willing to say that other Christians, who have different views or lifestyles to themselves, are still, nevertheless, Christian, and have a Christian integrity that must be part of the Church; and, second, those who think that this simply cannot and must not be the case.