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"A senior Anglican source in London confirmed [Southern Cone Archbishop Gregory] Venables's assessment that at least 22 of the [38] primates would demand the breach with America," says The Times. (Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the Primate of the West Indies, only counted 14-20 in an interview with The Telegraph.)

The Times story ends with a harrowing side-note: "The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement is asking David Blunkett, the home secretary, to bar [Archbishop of Nigeria Peter] Akinola from entering Britain in October on the grounds that he might incite hatred of gay people." Um, isn't it Akinola who has more to fear from the visit?

NYT: Many homosexuals don't believe in marriage
Canadian homosexuals haven't rushed to the altar largely because many of them don't believe in marriage, The New York Times reported Sunday. "I'd be for marriage if I thought gay people would challenge and change the institution and not buy into the traditional meaning of 'till death do us part' and monogamy forever," said Mitchel Raphael, editor of the Toronto gay magazine Fab. "We should be Oscar Wildes and not like everyone else watching the play."

David Andrew agrees. "Personally, I saw marriage as a dumbing down of gay relationships," he said. "My dread is that soon you will have a complacent bloc of gay and lesbian soccer moms."

At issue, isn't really marriage, it's monogamy. "I can already hear folks saying things like: 'Why are bathhouses needed? Straights don't have them,'" University of Toronto sociologist Rinaldo Walcott wrote in Fab. "Will queers now have to live with the heterosexual forms of guilt associated with something called cheating?"

"First of all, it's not 'something called cheating,' it's cheating, pure and simple." responds National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg. "What such cutely ironic post-modern quips reveal is that many in the gay community don't really mean it when they say they want access to the institution of marriage. … If the activists think marriage can still be something called marriage, after the folks at Fab magazine rewrite all the rules, then they are the ones who just don't get it."

More on the Anglican Church breakup:

• Episcopal vote spurs priests to take stand | 14 area clerics worry about church's mission (The Tennessean, Nashville)
  
  
• Church of Uganda cuts relations with U.S. diocese | Gay bishop at center of move (The Monitor, Kampala, Uganda)
  
  
• Diocese money kept in escrow | Some Episcopalians in area were going to cut pledges to church that there likely are people in the diocese who support it (Peoria Journal Star, Ill.)
  
  
• Eternally out of date? | The Episcopal Church flirts with schism (Mackubin Thomas Owens and Jonathan Ostman, National Review Online)
  
  
• How Wales is leading the Church of England towards a brave new world | Supporters of new alliances of conservative churches within Britain point to the Church in Wales as proof that an independent Anglican church can enjoy distinct but close relations with the Church of England (The Western Mail, Wales)
  
  
• Bishops to meet on gay issue | Anglican bishops from southern Africa are to meet in Johannesburg in two weeks to debate the tensions in the worldwide church over gay clergy (SAPA, South Africa)
  
  
• Archbishop warns Anglican church faces 'messy' future (Ananova)
  
  
• Episcopal priest resigning over gay bishop's election | Congregation leader in Catonsville expects many members to follow (The Baltimore Sun)
  
  
• Traditional Anglican parish explored in Hanover | A group of current or former Episcopalians, seeking to distance themselves from their troubled denomination's recent history and action, is planting seeds for a traditionalist Anglican congregation (Herald-Progress, Ashland, Va.)
  
  

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47