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By Hilary White

CANTERBURY, UK, August 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Gene Robinson has castigated a fellow Anglican bishop for publicly disapproving of his crusade to inculcate “gay” values into the Anglican Communion. In an interview with SXNews, an Australian homosexual news website festooned with explicit sexual advertising, Robinson complained that the Sydney archdiocese is “bigoted” because its archbishop, Dr. Peter Jensen, boycotted the Lambeth conference, held this month in Canterbury, England.

Gene Robinson is the active homosexual whose consecration as Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire caused a crisis in the global Anglican Communion. He called the Sydney archbishop’s defence of Christianity “ironic” given that Sydney is considered one of the “great gay cities of the world.”

Archbishop Jensen was one of those who, instead of Lambeth, attended instead the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). Convened in Jerusalem and attended by almost a third of the world’s Anglican bishops, GAFCON was conceived as an alternative to Lambeth, as a venue for discussion among those Anglican leaders who continue to hold to Christian moral and scriptural ideas.
 
  Robinson has made himself the leading spokesman of the homosexualist doctrine that homosexuality is a “God-given” condition that must be accepted by Christianity. In the lengthy interview, Robinson said he was unhappy about being “cast in the role of single issue person” and was angry that he had not been invited to Lambeth.

“Gay people have been abused, really, by the church,” he said, “and just mindlessly suggesting that they go back is like telling an abused spouse to go back to her husband.”

“But what I say is that God and the church aren’t the same thing. The church has gotten this and many other things wrong. God hasn’t gotten it wrong,” he said.

Despite Robinson’s persistent claims of persecution, the homosexualist viewpoint is well represented in the Anglican Communion and was prominent at Lambeth. Robinson was in Canterbury during the three week Conference, giving interviews and lectures on his ideas for a new “gay” Christianity. He was the centre of the work of homosexual activists who had made Lambeth a showcase of homosexualist political and quasi-religious campaigning.

Other bishops, particularly those who had decided not to boycott, were outraged at the “in your face” nature of the homosexual lobbying at the Conference.

One bishop of the Global South group said, “They are intent to push their agenda on us. No other lobbying groups seem to enjoy similar access, or to be able to have their literature prominently displayed all over the campus and at the entrance to every residence. They are determined that their way is the only right way and that everyone else should follow.”

The Bishop of Egypt, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa, the Rt. Rev. Mouneer Anis, spoke of his disgust at the blatant “advocacy of unscriptural practices” going on at the Conference and called the sexual obsessions of the liberal faction, “a new form of slavery: a slavery to modern secular culture and to immoral desires and lusts.”

Anis said, “Everywhere we go here, we meet gay & lesbian activists, receive their news letters or read about their many events. Many seem to be supported by North American churches.”

In a statement to the media, Anis said, “I see a great wall being put up by revisionists against those orthodox who believe in the authority of Scripture.”

“The revisionists among us push upon us the view that current secular culture and not the Bible should shape our mission and morals. In this we are not divided by mere trivialities, or issues on the periphery of faith but on essentials. I am shocked to say that we are finding it very hard to come together on even the essentials of the faith we once received from the Apostles.”

In the end, newspapers who had been covering the Lambeth conference, concluded that those in attendance had made no progress towards resolving the conflicts that are tearing the Anglican Communion apart. Currently there are about 77 million members of the Communion, the great majority of whom live in areas represented by the Global South bishops. In the western and more “liberal” areas, the Anglican churches are dying out with shrinking and aging congregations and a crisis over what to do with the buildings.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

No Hope for a Return to Orthodox Christianity from Lambeth: US Traditional Anglican Leader
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jul/08071714.html

Female Anglican Bishop at Lambeth Conference Accuses Fellow Bishops of Wife Beating
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jul/08073007.html

Chaos at Canterbury: Rowan Williams Said to Have “Betrayed” Church
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/aug/08080105.html