As usual, I always find Susan Russell’s An Inch At a Time to be insightful. Her recent entry about conservative dirty fighting and using Levitical issues to distract on frome more germane ones, such as the war, poverty, etc, is definitely thought provoking. I definitely admire her for her outspokenness.
Here is a recent article in the New York Times about the division in the Episcopal Church.
Peter Akinola, the Anglican Primate of Nigeria, creeps me out. As an openly gay man and an American Episcopalian, I find him to be extremely frustrating (to put it kindly). He is the leading international voice of homophobia in the Anglican Communion. He is a voice of violence, whether it is implicity against LGBT people or counter-violence against Muslims in Nigeria. And he has become influential in some extremely conservative factions of the American Episcopal Church. Normally, xenophobic right wingers (as Susan Russell observes) would never dream of placing the US under foreign influence, but this is what a few them wish to do regarding episcopal authority. Certain issues are anathema to them – the new national bishop is a woman, but more dangerous to them is the presence of LGBT in the church. An entry about Peter Akinola on titusonenine has some sampling of conservative responses. This was the most chilling response:
We need to defrock Griswold & elevate Bishop Peter Akinola to take over as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA. He seems to be a man of faith & conviction which are characteristics that Mr. Griswold lacks. I have no problem the network becoming aligned with the Global South and the Southern Cone. The Anglican Communion is + Rowan Williams’ to loose.
Most of the responses seem to echo the one above, but thanfully, someone speaks up:
It is one thing to consider homosexuality a sin, based on one’s reading of Scripture, and to preach against it, it is quite another to express the kind of hateful venom Peter Akinola has expressed and to do so while watching one’s people suffer poverty as one sits in one’s limo is atrocious. His sucking up to tyrants, while hardly unique to him, is another blot on him and his message. We kill our brothers and sisters if we call them fools. How many such murders has Peter Akinola committed with his rhetoric? I doubt saying someone is sinning is tantamount to murder, but saying some is a brute beast and less than a dog surely is. As someone seriously struggling with this issue, I look to those who practice the love of neighbour which Christ said is the second commandment and like to the first, which is love of God. I do not find such Christian love in anything Akinola does or says. Not saying I find clear Christianity on the other side either, but if Akinola represents what it is to be Christian, I have to wonder whose teachings I am reading in the Gospels.
It’s tempting to have a Sinead O’Connor type of moment where one would rip up Akinola’s photo and proclaim, “Fight the real enemy!” It has theatrical appeal, but assaulting the image of this man would accomplish nothing. The question is, how does one deal with an international bully, especially since we live in the age of the bullies?
Tags: Episcopal church, gay rights, YouTube
