More like this, please.
A few years ago, after the US branch of the Anglican Church (the US branch is, of course, the Episcopal Church) decided to embrace simple human decency by openly accepting their gay flock, the more reactionary branches of the worldwide Anglican Church (led by a bunch of bishops who don't really care about those annoying human rights that some scruffy Jewish rabbi lectured at length about a couple of thousand years ago) had bunches and bunches of kittens, then started sending spittle flecked "you must cast out teh gay right now or we'll take our toys and go home" missives to the head of the church.
Who, in a spectacular case of cowardice (this fellow hasn't even met with anyone from the US Episcopal Church,) buckled and told the US that they have to cast teh gay out immediately or there will be severe consequences.
So far it's the usual script of "church does decent thing, fundamentalists have a screaming fit, church tucks its tail between its legs and cravenly backs down." But, wonderfully enough, the US Episcopal Church didn't want to play this script, and when the diktat from Canterbury was delivered, the leadership of the Episcopals said no. And, better yet, they voted to say no at a meeting in Texas, of all places.
You don't know how much this cheers me up. Sure, the United States may have become a petty dictatorship where torture is the norm, and it may have become a nasty Hobbesian state where the government's reaction to a horrible disaster is to whip out the fiddles, but every time I see some Christians actually acting like Christians instead of brownshirts with Bibles it makes me think that there's actually a chance this country will survive its latest brush with totalitarianism.
(ObCanadaContent: The Canadian branch of the Angelicans has not voted on whether to tell Canterbury to go away or not yet, but the Star claims that it's very likely that they'll tell the fundamentalists to go away as well. This is a nice change from watching the ongoing Evil Party capture of the Canadian government.)
(link from Scott Tribe, via Slap Upside the Head)
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And I can’t tell you how thrilled I am as an American Episcopalian who doesn’t think TEH WIMMINZ!! and TEH GAYS!!! should be less than fully included in the life of the church that the House of Bishops finally said “You have moved the goalposts one too many times and we aren’t going to play along any more”.
The day after the last goalpost move, my own bishop announced that he wasn’t going to tell his clergy to not perform same-sex blessings. (They were happening anyway under the last bishop, who explicitly forbade them, but didn’t make a big deal about it unless one made the papers.)
Here we stand, we can do no else.
Thanks for the props. As you might imagine, we’ve been getting it from both sides; the secular element who thinks that all Christians are fundy asshats, and the conservative religious element (including within the Anglican communion) who think we’re not Proper Christians for thinking closets are for clothes.