No women bishops for the CofE

In General Synod across the Pond, the Bishops voted for the Women.  The Clergy Voted for the Women.  But the Laity missed the required super-majority by 6 votes;  hence, there will be no women bishops in the Church of England for at least another 5 years.  I posted on facebook that they were greasing the skids to slip even faster into irrelevance. 

 Andrew Brown in the Guardian:

I think I have just watched the Church of England commit suicide. It was a very long and very boring process. But at the end of nine hours' rehearsal of stale arguments made in bad faith the General Synod took a decisive turn into fantasy, or stumbled over its own rules, and failed, by a very small margin, to gain the complicated majorities required to make women bishops. ...  

...[A]ll we got on Tuesday was a ghastly mixture of tedium and bad faith. We saw the prolongation of an argument that has not changed at all in 20 years. There is quite literally nothing new to say on the subject. 

The speakers in favour were worthy but dull, but the traditionalist rhetoric had a ghastly fascination, as if it came from another planet, one where light no longer travels in straight lines but spirals towards some terrible singularity or black hole.
Traditionalists said things like: "I have always said that I would vote for women bishops if it met the theological objections of the traditionalists." This sounds as if it makes sense – until you remember that the theological objection of the traditionalists is that there shouldn't, or can't be women bishops at all. Yet they spoke with apparent sincerity.... 

 What was wrong was worse than the tedium of 20-year-old bureaucratic wrangles. It was a kind of systematic dishonesty and refusal to admit reality. 

Although the debate was notionally about the arrangements for women bishops – the principle having long since been conceded – the real objection came from conservative evangelicals who had not conceded the principle and never will. They do not, quite simply, believe that women should exercise teaching authority over men. 

Again and again, opponents claimed they longed to see women bishops accepted by the whole church. Each time this happened, I had to pinch myself to remember that they were the bit of the church that didn't and don't accept women as bishops. If they want to see women bishops accepted by the whole church, all they need do is accept them. 

This was the reality. Everyone in the chamber understood it very well. But no one would admit to it. The synod was bound within invisible pews, sitting in circles, gazing only at itself.