A letter to Rowan

We talked previously about how the legal minds of the CofE have gone to great lengths to figure out how they can ask the right questions about sex in order to ensure no problematically gay bishop is appointed. (This works only as long as those who are already appointed keep to their closets. Which is why Gay Bishops Should Come Out.)

The LGBT-led Metropolitan Community Church scolds Rowan Williams for the hair splitting.H/T to Thinking Anglicans:

We understand that the legal advice suggests that there should be no bar, per se, to gay men serving as bishops provided that they repent of any same sex activity before they entered the priesthood, have lived by the requirement to be celibate since ordination and promise to continue to be celibate.

We feel that the spectacle of the Church of England trying to avoid complying with the law is unedifying and betrays a deep unease about the wonderful diversity of human sexuality. ...

We also think the policy of requiring celibacy will simply make the Church of England look even more ridiculous and open yourselves up to the most dreadful kind of casuistry as people wonder what, exactly celibacy requires. Could, for example, a gay bishop kiss his partner? Does the bishop and his partner have to sleep in separate rooms in the episcopal palace, or would twin beds in the same room suffice? If twin beds are acceptable what would be a “celibate” distance between the beds – 5 feet, 10 feet, or opposite ends of the room? Do any lapses in this celibacy rule have to be reported and, if so, to whom? The Archbishop of the Province? Her Majesty The Queen? The Prime Minister? The Diocesan Synod or just the local press? ....

We are an lgbt-led church, yet we talk far more about mission than we do about sexuality. We commend this approach to you.

Heh.

I have often said that I will be very happy to stop talking about sexuality as soon as other people stop making it an issue.

Coming Out as a Leader

By now you have heard all about the "Slee Memo" which exposes the machinations used by the Archbishop of Canterbury to ensure that a celibate gay man would NOT become Bishop of Southwark. If you haven't, trot over to the Lead and read all about it there. It paints a very unflattering picture of the Archbishop, and casts a very poor light on a process wreathed in secrecy. Yelling at people, reducing participants to tears, and arm-twisting in the men's room are hardly examples of effective leadership let alone Christian ethics.

And then, in a fit of legalism, they decide that while they can't eliminate someone simply because he's gay, they can eliminate him because people in the diocese might not approve. So a racist must be placated if a candidate is black? The Church Times reveals there is a "checklist" to be applied to gay candidates that is profoundly offensive. There isn't even a pretense of making this equivalent to sexual history questions asked of straight people, showing yet again that it's not about Biblical standards of sexual morality, but selective and hypocritcal application of such standards to gay people only, while giving straight people a bye. Go over to Grandmere Mimi's blog to learn more.

My take on all this is that the Archbishop long since decided to throw over his principles in an attempt to hold things together. He sees a need to placate the conservatives on gays, and on women. Of course, the conservatives will never be placated (witness our Republicans in Congress who plan to plunge the country into default or decimate the entire government, no middle way about it). And by not being true and honest to his own beliefs, the Archbishop lost the ability to lead. He's not leading. He's reacting. In his efforts to save the CofE and the Anglican Communion, he's basically ensured their demise. The irony is something, isn't it. Rather than helping the C of E "get over it", he's ensured that the Gay Issue remains front and center.

Real leaders do not yell or bully. They do not operate in secrecy and manipulate the circumstances. Real leaders make difficult decisions. Real leaders do not exploit confidential situations, but rather operate as if all were transparent. Real leaders do not fall in love with power, but always remember power is fleeting. And real leaders do not put the institution above human and humane values. Although the issue here is different, the essential corruption of putting the institution over values is the same as the Roman Catholic church covering up abuse.

Slee's memo further states,

The danger, several years down the line, is that there are bishops who unquestionably have been less than candid about their domestic arrangements and who, in a conspiracy of silence, have been appointed to senior positions. It is in the nature of things that this situation cannot endure, and exposure of the reality wold be 'nuclear'.

No kidding!

Like Gene Robinson, Jeffrey John was not the first gay candidate for Bishop. He's simply honest. Those gay bishops should be ashamed of themselves. They are no different than Larry Craig, the toe-tapping Idaho Senator who never missed a vote against gay people while hiding the fact that he's himself gay, or George Rekers, the anti-gay zealot who travels with a rentboy to "lift his luggage."

So now, there's an opportunity for leadership from those bishops. Do they continue to protect their tidy little closet, for the sake of power and influence, as the walls start to crumble? Or do they finally step out of the closet, bearing witness to their service, and help their church through this crisis into an honest future?

Are they leaders, or not?

Gay Bishops : it's time to come out.

The travels of Rowan Williams: how did he get here, from there?

Both Diana Butler Bass and our own Elizabeth Kaeton have commented recently on the Archbishop of Canterbury's focus on irrelevancies: hats, and whether the vicar smiles enough at the wedding.

I was reminded recently that people were happy and expectant when Rowan Williams was named ABC. How did he throw so many overboard; women and GLBT people? How did he go from this:

...Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world); and this immediately brings us up against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without any clear payoff', but - just as worryingly - of non-functional joy: or, to put it less starkly, joy whose material "production" is an embodied person aware of grace. ....

...In other words, if we are looking for a sexual ethic that can be seriously informed by our Bible, there is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a norm, however important and theologically significant it may be. When looking for a language that will be resourceful enough to speak of the complex and costly faithfulness between God and God's people, what several of the biblical writers turn to is sexuality understood very much in terms of the process of "entering the body's grace". If we are afraid of facing the reality of same-sex love because it compels us to think through the processes of bodily desire and delight in their own right, perhaps we ought to be more cautious about appealing to Scripture as legitimating only procreative heterosexuality.

to this:

In other words, the question is not a simple one of human rights or human dignity. It is that a certain choice of lifestyle has certain consequences. So long as the Church Catholic, or even the Communion as a whole does not bless same-sex unions, a person living in such a union cannot without serious incongruity have a representative function in a Church whose public teaching is at odds with their lifestyle.

This is a man who immediately excoriates TEC for electing Mary Glasspool, while he says next to nothing about the Uganda "kill the gays" bill. A man who is palpably annoyed at troublesome women who actually expect, you know, equality.

Tobias Haller suggests, in the thread to his recent post

There occurred to me a thought that I think sums him and his attitude to TEC up: "I have sacrificed my conscience and my friends for the sake of unity, and I don't see why you shouldn't do the same." He hasn't said that, but actions speak louder than words. That the "unity" he seeks is unatainable, or already lost, he doesn't seem able to see.

As I commented to Tobias there, hand clapped to forehead. That's it.

Shakespeare wrote,

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

True to oneself, one's beliefs, one's values, and one's understanding of what's right. And should you give all that up, you find you make an idol of "unity". And what's left?

Rowan Williams' Problem with Americans

Our friend Lisa over at My Manner of Life ruminates about Abp Rowan Williams' recent "mumblemumble" as she puts it.

Lisa comments on the willful hypocrisy of the ABC in blaming the Episcopal Church for all the current problems, as though only TEC is liberal on the issue of GLBT inclusion. That is, we know, a flat out lie, and in fact other Anglican churches (such as sensible Canada) have been even further in front. Of course, as Prior Aelred has told us, the problem is not that TEC ordains gay Bishops, it's that TEC does it HONESTLY. (Yes, CofE, we are looking at you and your closeted gay bishops and secret gay eucharists!)

Lisa writes,

I am coming to believe that Archbishop Williams has a particular animus against the U.S., which he extends to The Episcopal Church. Given that so many national churches in the Anglican Communion are moving toward ordination of gay/lesbian people … and accepting gay/lesbian unions …. why does he reserve such particular hatred for those of us in the U.S.? I do not understand.

Lisa's questions got me to thinking. I am an academic who lived happily in the UK for a number of years and one of the things I learned was the British academic liberals are much more liberal and PC than their American counterparts. And one of the MOST PC things a certain type of British academic liberal believes is that Everything is the Fault of the Americans.

I remember around the time of the Gulf War overhearing a rather pompous person sitting at the same refectory table who was absolutely excoriating the US actions. I became annoyed at this because he was deliberately ignoring the fact that the British were willing and active supporters of the US policy, and I dared challenge him on this: Perhaps he should look to his own country's involvement, which he had the potential, as a citizen, to change! He just about blew up, denied that the British carried any independent responsibility for their own actions, and went back to completely bashing everything American.

Of course, he wanted everything that American initiative and ingenuity created--he just didn't want to credit the Yanks for it. I am convinced that if the US, metaphorically speaking, tried to save a starving animal, this type would kick it to the ground simply to oppose what the Americans were doing. Because in their minds, Americans never do anything good.

Now, let me stress that this is a specific type of person, certainly not characteristic of the majority of Brits (who are fine and stalwart friends), but characteristic of a rarified atmosphere found notably in ivory tower academics, where the lack of oxygen can lead to odd behavior. Not all academics, mind you, but a certain slice of them. So I want you to consider from whence comes the ABC.

I suggest that Rowan Williams is acculturated to loathe Americans. He buys into the stereotype that we are rich bullies: crass, stupid, and unsophisticated, with an Oxbridge snobbery about it. That is why, as Lisa notes, he is empowering the hate-propagating schismatics, and ignoring what he knows is right: because if the Americans are doing it, it must be wrong. He ignores the equal role of other groups let alone his own church. He ignores his own complicity. He cannot see the log in his own eye, while he gouges at the speck he perceives in TEC.

What the CofE can learn from TEC

Writing in the Times of London, a British expatriate talks about her Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, and what the Church of England could learn from TEC:

I hate to sound as if I’m boasting, but at the Anglican church my family attends in Los Angeles, you have to go early if you want a seat.....St James Church, which sits at the intersection of an affluent middle-class neighbourhood, and many poorer communities in LA, is an Episcopal Church, that is the American equivalent of the Church of England. But, unlike its British cousins, it is packed because it goes out of its way to create a community in a big, sprawling city.....

When I moved to LA a dozen or so years ago, religion was incidental to my life. ....But the combination of having children and moving to the US changed everything. It led to finding a school for my boys that happened to be attached to an Episcopal church, which meant there were all-school chapel services, and care for the spiritual well being of a child, not just academic achievement — something with which we were familiar from our own childhoods. Subconsciously, my husband and I were probably seduced by the similarities the school had with memories of England.

We started attending the church. Our eldest joined the choir. The hymns were the same, even if they got the tunes wrong, and the words of the service were as I remembered them growing up in a village in Hertfordshire 40-odd years before.

While churches in England have, for the most part, modernised their services in an attempt to attract bigger crowds — some of them becoming painfully evangelical and happy clappy — the Episcopal church in the US still uses the older, traditional liturgies, the ones that I remember nostalgically. It was these superficial trappings that appealed to us originally. My husband, who writes music for a living, is a sucker for a choir — but it is the values that we found there that has really kept us coming back.

At our church, it is not unusual to see children with two mums or two dads, sitting next to Koreans, African-Americans, Hispanics, as well as many white middle-class families. There are monied people from Beverly Hills, rubbing shoulders with artists from downtown. Gay people next to straight. It’s jolly, social and somehow has a relevance to everyone’s life. It reflects an acceptance of all, the kind of value I’d like my children to have. And it is a community. Spirituality, I believe, comes from acknowledging that we are part of something greater than just ourselves.....

I am now largely embarrassed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who took it upon himself to advise the bishops of the diocese of LA against electing the Rev Canon Mary D. Glasspool to be a bishop, because she happens to be openly gay.

I asked our rector, the Rev Paul Kowalewski, why his church was always full. “We are part of a community,” he says. “In a big city like Los Angeles, people are looking for a community. We give them the welcome they are looking for.”

New Facebook group challenges the ABC

On Wednesday morning, December 9th a new Facebook group was created: "Anglicans who want THIS statement from Canterbury. " In less than 48 hours, the membership of the group has swelled to over 2500 and counting. Members include former staff from Lambeth Palace and at least one current bishopsin the Episcopal Church. The statement the group is signing onto follows:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has failed to exercise moral leadership to protect gays & lesbians in Uganda and has instead exercised political pressure to attack a bishop-elect in Los Angeles because she is a lesbian.

As Anglicans who treasure their Communion and expect more from their Archbishop, in the Advent spirit of John the Baptist's cry to the religious leaders of his time, we call on+Rowan Williams to repent of his earlier statement and issue this one instead...

Go to Walking with Integrity for more info, check out the group on Facebook to join.

Rowan Williams responds to LA election

Let's just be clear, shall we? Rowan Williams has nothing to say about the Gay Death Bill in Uganda, nor the African bishops who support it.

But about LA, he says,

The election of Mary Glasspool by the Diocese of Los Angeles as suffragan bishop elect raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole.

The process of selection however is only part complete. The election has to be confirmed, or could be rejected, by diocesan bishops and diocesan standing committees. That decision will have very important implications.

The bishops of the Communion have collectively acknowledged that a period of gracious restraint in respect of actions which are contrary to the mind of the Communion is necessary if our bonds of mutual affection are to hold.

From this, i take his message to be: Kill gays if you must, anything so long as you don't make them Bishops.

As Rev Barbara Harris, the first woman Bishop in the Episcopal Church, said memorably

"If you don't want GLBT folks as bishops, don't ordain them as deacons, better yet, be honest and say 'we don't want you, you don't belong here' and don't bestow on them the sacrament of baptism to begin with," said Harris to applause. "How can you initiate someone and treat them like they are half-assed baptized."

Update: Andrew Brown, writing the Guardian, nails it:

Consider the case of two Anglicans of the same gender who love one another. If they are in the USA, the Anglican church will marry them and may elect one of them to office. If they are in Uganda, the Anglican church will have try to have them jailed for life, and ensure that any priest who did not report them to the authorities within 24 hours would be jailed for three years; anyone who spoke out in their defence might be jailed for seven.

Under Williams, the church that marries two women who love each other is to be thrown out of the Anglican Communion. The church that would jail them both for life, and would revile and persecute their defenders, stays snugly in his bosom. Not even the Archbishop's remarkable gift for obfuscation can conceal these facts forever.

Or, as the irrepressible MadPriest put it, "Surely what's good for the gUSe should also be good for Uganda."

Update 2, another excellent piece in the Guardian:

The consecration of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people as bishops, and blessing of same-sex partnerships, have been hotly debated in Anglican circles in recent years. Most provinces disapprove of such relationships, at least publicly, though some – such as the Church of England – rely heavily on LGBT clergy and layworkers. The Episcopal church, with the Anglican Church of Canada, has gone further than most towards including LGBT people at all levels.

Some see this as arrogance, others as bold prophetic leadership. Yet the Episcopal church is more in tune with traditional Anglicanism than many of its critics and supporters would admit.

Read the whole thing to find out how.

Abp Williams stands up to Pope

From the Times of London:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has mounted a direct challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's stance against the ordination of women priests.

In a speech in Rome today, he made clear there could be no turning back of the clock on women priests to appease the Pope, the Catholic Church or malcontents in the Church of England.

He dismissed the Pope's plan to welcome disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic Church as little more than a "pastoral response" which broke little new ground in relations between the two churches.....

He damningly described the papal decree which outlined norms for a new Anglican Ordinariate to allow Anglicans to convert to Rome as creating a "chaplaincy" rather than a church.....

And in a significant departure from Anglican polity, he did not apologise for the ordination of women priests, the development in 1992 that derailed progress towards full unity between the two churches. Instead, he issued a direct challenge to the Catholic prohibition on women's ordination and said that refusing to ordain women could not enhance a Church communion.

"For many Anglicans, not ordaining women has a possible unwelcome implication about the difference between baptised men and baptised women," he said.

The Anglican provinces that now ordained women had retained rather than lost their Catholic holiness and sacramentalism, he said.

Acknowledging the divisions in the Anglican Communion, he said that the way Anglican leaders were dealing with division and dissent held its own lessons for Catholics. "Is it nonsense to think that holding on to a limited but real common life and mutual acknowledgement of integrity might be worth working for within the Anglican family? And if it can be managed within the Anglican family, is this a possible model for the wider ecumenical scene?"

h/T Mad Priest

Rowan's failure

The Pluralist lets us know how the Vatican "expotition" into Anglican polity will play out and how Rowan has utterly failed.

Let's do a round up of recent worldwide Anglican history to the present.

We have an Archbishop of Canterbury who brought his High Church identity into his job, along with his form of narrative theology, and was thought to have skills relating himself to contemporary society and social movements.

He headed a Church of England in the middle of an identity crisis, as one school, the Evangelicals, thought they were on a takeover trip, where the Liberals' ability to handle the middle and keep relatively quiet was coming undone, much because the Catholic traditionalists were defeated on female ordination and looked to be finished regarding female bishops. No longer a triangle, it was Evangelicals versus the Liberals.

The Archbishop then started on his quest to answer a question from Rome always put, that is, 'What is Anglicanism?' Williams's answer was to use the crisis now around the Evangelical's issue of homosexuality, which gave them some third world ballast and international power-leverage, to build a worldwide Anglican identity more like a Church than a Communion. Whilst he and successors could not be a pope, he could have Instruments of Communion.
....
But now Benny has pulled the rug from under him and stuck the knife in. Before Rowan Williams can go to Rome with a Covenant on a silver tray, before some 'solution' can be made regarding women bishops, Benny has done what he wants. He could have waited three or five years, which is nothing in Roman Catholic timing, though plenty for his stage in life.

What a humiliation for Rowan Williams to have to sit next to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and make sweet ecumenical noises. What a climb down that Williams has (again in Curia style, as it must 'fall to him') to write to "the Bishops of the Church of England, and the members of the Primates Meeting of the Anglican Communion" ...

here is one good thing about what the Pope has done, in short-circuiting all the agony of Anglicanism. He will bring this Covenant nonsense to a quicker conclusion regarding its failure; he will get females as bishops in the Church of England cleaner and should be quicker; he will make it more obvious that Anglican ecumenism lies with the Old Catholics and the Lutherans and with Protestant denominations; and he might just persuade Rowan Williams to end his disastrous period in Anglican office by resignation sooner than would have been the case when his imposition of his pet project fell to pieces.

Read it all here

Small steps that reverberate

Lots of folks are hearing about the Episcopal Church in the news because of the recent events at General Convention that made some small movements towards full inclusion of the LGBT faithful in the life of the church. Articles in major dailies around the country, stories on NPR, all far more noticeable than the usual blog-chatter.

Let's review. The consecration of an honest gay man as Bishop in 2003 became the rallying point for conservatives who resist the changes in the church. Indeed, conservative, anti-gay movement in the church is defined solely by their shared disgust with gays and contaminated by the ultra-partisan conservative political movement in the US. Although they point haphazardly at other issues, it's really only about this one.

Why this issue? A conservative saddened by these events, Fr Tim Chesterton, notes:

They could have chosen a couple of other issues, on both of which the Bible is every bit as clear (more so in my view), and which are every bit as relevant to the struggles of people in the modern world.......Sadly, for the vast majority of Anglicans the issue of homosexuality does not carry that personal price-tag. Most of us are straight; we aren't the ones who would be bearing the cross if the church as a whole agreed that same-sex unions are not a legitimate part of a life of following Jesus. Gays and lesbians are an easy target, because there aren't many of them (tho' more, perhaps, than some Christians would like to think).

Personally, I think it's a tragedy that we're drawing these lines in the sand at all. Historically, it's not been our way as Anglicans. On the (equally clear) biblical teachings about war and peace and about usury, we've allowed for a variety of biblical interpretation. Why is homosexuality so despicable that we don't make similar allowances?

It's the "ick" factor-- and the ultimate "us vs. them". The nasty power play of conservatives in the US is now (mostly) over; their effort to take over TEC failed, they've left the Episcopal church. Plan B is to try to replace the liberal TEC with a parallel structure, but their numbers aren't very high, and schismatics make other people nervous.

Those of us watching know that the problem is not that the American church is uniquely friendly to GLBT. The Americans don't have more gay clergy. And they certainly haven't performed more gay blessings (let's remember that full civil unions are legal in Britain). It's just that the Americans are honest about it. So it was only a matter of time before the conservatives flexed their muscle elsewhere. It's a basic schoolyard fact that if you attempt to placate bullies, instead you embolden them.

Well, the conservatives have tried it in England. The Archbishop tried to placate them with a letter in which he disparaged "gay lifestyles" and even disapproved of partnered gay clergy. And despite pleas from activists like Madpriest that they wake from their somnolence, the liberals have for the most part not stood up to the bullies, or for that matter the Archbishop. Until now. As reported in The Times

Pro-gays in the Church of England are planning a survey of all LGBT clergy, in and out of the closet, in London, Southwark and throughout the Church. In the capital, they reckon, it is as many as 20 per cent. They are also intending to survey precisely how many gay blessings have been and are being done. Again, estimates put the number in the hundreds.

After that, bearing in mind the General Synod elections next year, they will make a push for the Church of England to approve gay blessings and gay ordinations to the priesthood and episcopate, as The Episcopal Church has done.

And in a related letter, a wide group of English liberals protests (rightly) against the Abp of Canterbury's missive-- which also compared faithfully partnered gay people to straight people having an affair. Well then. Someone woke up!

The really offensive nature of the Abp's letter is particularly striking given the change in his own views. As quoted by commenter klday in the comments to a previous FoJ thread below, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan University says

In an essay entitled “The Body’s Grace” (1989), Williams suggests that the problem with homosexuality is sexuality itself. Unlike heterosexual relationships, which the Church can reduce to reproduction, “same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is—in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process.” Facing desire itself, we face our own vulnerability—to loss, to humiliation, and to joy. Williams then goes on to sketch non-reproductive desire as an image of God’s (often unreciprocated) yearning for humanity, grounding his vision in Hosea, Samuel, and even Paul. If anyone can still stomach it, then, those who undertake the “painstaking exegesis” for which the Archbishop calls would do well to start with his own.

(More resources on the theology of same sex marriagehere).

But I want to finish with a quote from our regular FoJ commenter counterlight, who in the same thread comments,

The Anglican World seems to be such a separate world sometimes that we forget that this conflict has major consequences far beyond our intramural struggles.

What would be the consequences for the struggle for gay rights? What would be the effect on gay cultural life, if a major historical branch of Christianity dropped its policy of segregation? What would the effect be on the religious conflicts within the lgbt community if this church not only accepted them but actively sought their participation in all aspects of its life including leadership?


What would be the effect on the larger society of such a change? How would the public image and the credibility of Christianity change?

Isn't that a fascinating question? Imagine! The forces of hate would lose the "ownership" of the "Christian card". Religion could become a tool for hope, rather than a weapon of destruction. This would allow all of us to move beyond this stupid obsession with the bedroom. Rather, we would simply apply the same rules of fidelity and integrity to any couple, and instead focus our efforts together on things that really matter, like poverty and peace and justice, like feeding the hungry and healing the sick--things that unite people of faith and secular progressives to improve our world.

And this possibility, so loaded with promise beyond a relatively small (if historically powerful and influential) denomination, explains why the press keeps returning to the question of The Episcopal Church to its new potential of hope, occupying a position at the forefront of justice, rather than following along behind.

If the Episcopalians, the definition of Establishment America, can do it, well then......it can be done.

Imagine...


Cross posted at Street Prophets

Rowan Williams then and now

Rowan Williams now:

And if this is the case, a person living in such a union is in the same case as a heterosexual person living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond; whatever the human respect and pastoral sensitivity such persons must be given, their chosen lifestyle is not one that the Church's teaching sanctions, and thus it is hard to see how they can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate, requires.

Rowan WIlliams then:

He argued that scriptural prohibitions were addressed to heterosexuals looking for sexual variety. He wrote: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.” Dr Williams described his view as his “definitive conclusion” reached after 20 years of study and prayer.....by the end of the 1980s he had “definitely come to the conclusion” that the Bible did not denounce faithful relationships between people who happened to be gay.

And now opposing GLBT inclusion has risen to the level of core doctrine, soon to be a codicil to the NIcene Creed. Who knew?

As Andrew Sullivan wrote:

The premise used to be that homosexuality was an activity, that gays were people who chose to behave badly; or, if they weren’t choosing to behave badly, were nonetheless suffering from a form of sickness or, in the words of the Vatican, an “objective disorder.” And so the question of whether to permit the acts and activities of such disordered individuals was a legitimate area of legislation and regulation.

But when gays are seen as the same as straights—as individuals; as normal, well-adjusted, human individuals—the argument changes altogether. The question becomes a matter of how we treat a minority with an involuntary, defining characteristic along the lines of gender or race. And when a generation came of age that did not merely grasp this intellectually, but knew it from their own lives and friends and family members, then the logic for full equality became irresistible.

Rowan Williams appears to be moving backwards.

The Velvet Reformation

The Atlantic Monthly looks at the Anglican Communion and Rowan Williams in the March issue. You can read the cover story online here. I'm curious to know what you think.

It is not a church, strictly speaking, but an aggregation of 44 national or regional churches claiming 80 million believers in all. In theory, its leaders have dealt with conflict by trying to follow the via media, the middle way between extremes. In practice, this means that extremes coexist, jostling each other. Sunday service can feature brilliantined choirboys, or an organist, or dancing women in kente cloth. C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot were Anglicans; so are George and Barbara Bush. The Episcopal Church has a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as its presiding bishop, while the Church of England has no women bishops at all. If this church cannot find a way forward on homosexuality, then none can—and the clash between gays and Christians over marriage and the like may go on for much of the millennium.