Anglican Leader Between A Rock And A Gay Place

Bad days are ahead for the Anglican church, I'd say, as its Archbishop panders to the country's most wealthy, liberal ... and morally questionable ... believers. Reports the Times of London:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is to hold a secret Communion service for gay clergy and their partners in London.

Williams will celebrate the Communion at the unfortunately named St Peter’s cathedral at tony Eaton Square, comparable to dishing up the wine and wafer in Cambridge or Nob Hill.

What's really interesting about this article is how it shows the duplicitous, double standard ways of the liberals when it comes to homosexuality. There's nothing wrong with gays, they say, but by all means, keep someone's gayness a big secret ... unless they're conservatives, of course.

The event has been organised under Chatham House rules, which prevent any disclosure of the discussions. The event will take place at 10am on November 29. A list of the names of those who will be present will be seen only by Dr Williams. It will be shredded afterwards.

Shredded?!

Look, my dear old Archbishop chap, you're either OK with gays or you're not. They're either just like us, or they're not, so if you're not shredding the names of clergy who attend your routine Communions, don't shred the names of the folks attending the gay ones. And if you're not offering a straight Lord's Supper, don't offer a gay one.

In this matter I am unusually in accord with the Rev Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement who blasted the Archie for trying to pull off the ceremony in secret. I'm no fan of secrecy, if for no reason than it's rarely a successful strategy. Kirker's got some other problems:

“I don’t think it is a good thing in many ways. The conditions of secrecy are quite at variance with the openness of his meetings with a panoply of antigay church leaders. We are astonished at the attempts to make the meeting clandestine when it would be far better to have this in the open. The fact that he wants to go there without anyone knowing he’s going there makes it quite clear that he has an attitude towards the event that he doesn’t have at any other meetings.”

All and all, it's trouble Williams doesn't need in a church that's barely holding together, pulled one way by those who believe the Bible is there for a living purpose and the other way by those who think the Book is a nice, but quaint and disposable, collection of literary imagery.