US Anglicans vote to allow ordination of gays
Updated 4 months ago
The Episcopal Church in the United States has voted to end a moratorium on the ordination of gays and lesbians as bishops, ignoring the rift the issue has already caused in the broader Anglican church.
At the Episcopalian General Convention in California, bishops voted Monday by 99-45, with two abstentions, in favor of a resolution which said that “God has called and may call such individuals” — referring to homosexual men and women — “to any ordained ministry” in the Episcopal Church.
The resolution was a response to one passed at the General Convention three years ago, which called for a halt to the consecration of “any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church.”
That resolution was aimed at healing and reconciling the Anglican Communion after the Episcopal Church consecrated its first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson.
But the earlier resolution failed to heal the wounds of the church, and last year, Anglican congregations in the United States joined forces with conservative churches in Africa and South America and moved to break away from the Episcopal Church after years of in-fighting, in part over gay clergy.
Bishop Henry Parsley of Alabama, who voted against the resolution on Monday, was quoted on the Episcopal Church’s web site as warning that the decision to once again allow the ordination of gay and lesbian bishops could widen the rift in the Anglican Communion.
“I think it will be interpreted internationally as a rejection” of the earlier resolution calling for a moratorium on the ordination of gays and lesbians, he said.
But the Reverend Susan Russell, president of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gender Episcopal advocacy group Integrity USA said the vote signaled that the Episcopal Church was once again telling “the truth about who we are.
“It was a vote for both unity and mission. This is a church that is ready to move on. It was a clear vote for mission for this church,” she was quoted as saying on the church’s website.
The Episcopal Church is a US branch of the Anglican Communion, whose mother church is the Church of England.
4 comments
Right-on! It’s about fuking time.
This is such great news! I started attending Episcopalian services a few times about 5 years ago, encouraged by their more compassionate stance on gays, but stopped after that church seemed to backpedal on its acceptance of gays by that moratorium on ordaining gays. As someone who grew up Catholic and stopped attending that church because of its increasingly political and homophobic stances, I thought why should I attend a church which is almost like the Catholics when that church is not willing to stand up to the bigots in their own community!
Well with this wonderful news, I may finally start attending church, at the Episcopalian church, after a long long time. As a very spiritual person, it hurt me to not have a church home. But I think I may finally have found one.
Bravo Episcopalians of the USA !
It’s nice to see a few followers of Jesus doing the right thing, but it’s really too little too late. Christianity is a failed belief system and quite possibly the largest collective failure that Western culture has ever produced. Just think of all the wars, torture, murders, and rapes that have been committed in the name of Jesus. I wouldn’t follow his followers if you paid me. What churches do to gay and lesbian children is nothing less than mental abuse.
The Catholic Church is far nastier and self-contradicting than most people realize — for instance, one of its cannon laws forbids paraplegic and other physically disabled men from marrying because their impaired Bobbitts can’t keep up with what pedophile priests do to altar boys! I’m serious! The corrupt Catholic Church will accept adulterous wife-dumpers/mother-killers Newt Gingrich, Deal Hudson and Randall Terry and hide gay pedophile priests from police, but it won’t allow open gays and straight disabled to marry or join the clergy. The Catholic Church forbids abortion and contraception to save mothers’ lives or to spare children of birth defects, then turns around and punishes childbirth-ruined women by annulling their marriages, and denying disabled kids all kinds of rights, especially if their gender is intersexed.