Rowan's road to schism

From The London Guardian-

Has Rowan Williams just set the Church of England on the road to disestablishment? Or does he envision it as standing outside the central body of Anglicanism that he is trying now to erect? I have just read carefully throughhis response to the American Church's recognition of equal gay rights, and there are two things that are really striking about it. The first is familiar from his earlier struggles with the matter: a certain airy disdain for the facts of the struggle in hand and the simple mutual hatred which has driven it for the last 20 years.

Who is going to believe him when he writes that "It needs to be made absolutely clear that, on the basis of repeated statements at the highest levels of the communion's life, no Anglican has any business reinforcing prejudice against LGBT people, questioning their human dignity and civil liberties or their place within the body of Christ."?

He may remember "repeated statements at the highest levels of the communion's life" – I remember two African bishops at the 1998 Lambeth conference walking past two American women priests, and one saying in a voice designed to be overheard "When I said there were no homosexuals in our country I should have added that this is because we have killed them all", a remark which struck both men as pretty damn funny. It was at the same conference that an English bishop said to me that his preferred solution to gay clergy was "to sew up their arseholes and throw the scissors away."

These attitudes haven't changed at all since then. And it is of course true that there are liberals who despise the conservatives along with the bigots just as much. But when I read Rowan's grand assertion that after the church has split in two, "a competitive hostility between the two would be one of the worst possible outcomes, and needs to be clearly repudiated", I ask "repudiated by whom?" If there weren't already a competitive hostility between the two factions of the American church we wouldn't be in this mess.

The rest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/jul/29/anglican-split-rowan-williams