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Homosexual 'Bishop' Attempts to Deflect Attention from Worldwide Anglican Schism

NEW YORK, September 14, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - At a forum in New York on Thursday, Gene Robinson, the homosexual activist who's 'ordination' to the episcopate of the US branch of the Anglican church has caused the fracturing of the entire worldwide Anglican communion, has accused faithful Christians of hypocrisy. Referring to the scandal caused by a Christian church endorsing active homosexuality, Robinson said, "How self-absorbed can we be, to be fighting over this when people are dying everywhere?"

Canadian columnist and then-Anglican, David Warren, writing for the Ottawa Citizen in 2002, predicted that the acceptance of active homosexuals within that church would cause a schism. On Thursday, Gene Robinson complained that the Bible has "been taken hostage" by "the conservative religious right." However it is difficult to argue with the plain words of scriptures that Jews and Christians have held holy for thousands of years. Warren wrote, "The Bible does, however, spare a few choice words for the practice of "sodomy", both in the Old Testament (which calls down air strikes) and in the New (a little gentler). The practice is condemned as an abomination -- without hesitation, qualification, or ambiguity -- wherever it appears."

A group of Anglican bishops of Asia and Africa have sent a letter of ultimatum to the representatives of the various branches of the Anglican Church around the world. They demand that there be unequivocal condemnation of homosexuality and disciplining of the North Americans. The letter said, "If this request is ignored, then plainly we have reached the end of the Anglican Communion in its present form."

Another former Anglican, writer and historian John Muggeridge, wrote that in the end, the fight in the Anglican Church will be over real estate. However the argument may shortly become moot with the rapidly dropping numbers of adherents to the Anglican Church in North America and England. The 'conservatives' may win the argument - and the church properties - by attrition. There are more Anglicans today in Nigeria alone, than in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. together.

David Warren, who converted to Catholicism in 2003, summed up the Christian position on the demands made by homosexual activists within the Christian fold: "We may forgive those who lapse into sin; and Christ is in the business of forgiving sinners. We cannot, however, change the definition of sin… The question before all Anglicans today, and those in many other mainstream Protestant confessions, is what will be sacrificed. Our errant sexuality to God, or our Church to the zeitgeist?"

New York Times coverage:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/national/11bishop.html

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