Stephen Bates’ column on the Guardian’s blog is worth a look.
He says, in part:
Truro church and Falls church have made it quite clear that they have been disenchanted with the Episcopal church’s liberal-leaning leadership for a long time, looking for an excuse to go. Virtually nothing could have persuaded them to stay. Although the proximate cause may have been the election three years ago of the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, the real causes lie in a fundamental disagreement over the nature of Anglicanism and a determination to wrest it from its broad and tolerant roots into a more evangelical, conservative direction.
The same thing is happening in England, where last week a faction of like-minded conservative evangelicals, with close ties to the US churches, presented a list of demands to Archbishop Rowan Williams, including a call for the right to appoint their own ministers without reference to their liberal diocesan bishops.
These groups have chosen homosexuality as a defining issue because they believe it is something that will unite and mobilise sympathisers in a way that other current issues in the church, such as women’s ordination, have not been able to do. There is still a visceral distaste for the idea of homosexuality and the prejudice against it can be characterised not as bigotry but as something sanctioned by a few (and there are only a few) references in the Bible. Interestingly, the same mobilisation in defence of biblical orthodoxy does not seem to apply to other facts of life about which the Bible’s authors were quite as adamant, pre-eminently divorce. Surely this can’t be – can it? – because many more folk have experience of divorce in their families these days than of homosexuality, and that even some of the most outspoken evangelical leaders are themselves divorced.