Via the New York Times…

Episcopalians Are Reaching Point of Revolt

As many as eight conservative Episcopal churches in Virginia are expected to announce today that their parishioners have voted to cut their ties with the Episcopal Church. Two are large, historic congregations that minister to the Washington elite and occupy real estate worth a combined $27 million, which could result in a legal battle over who keeps the property.

In a twist, these wealthy American congregations are essentially putting themselves up for adoption by Anglican archbishops in poorer dioceses in Africa, Asia and Latin America who share conservative theological views about homosexuality and the interpretation of Scripture with the breakaway Americans.

“The Episcopalian ship is in trouble,” said the Rev. John Yates, rector of The Falls Church, one of the two large Virginia congregations, where George Washington served on the vestry. “So we’re climbing over the rails down to various little lifeboats. There’s a lifeboat from Bolivia, one from Rwanda, another from Nigeria. Their desire is to help us build a new ship in North America, and design it and get it sailing.”

Together, these Americans and their overseas allies say they intend to form a new American branch that would rival or even supplant the Episcopal Church in the worldwide Anglican Communion, a confederation of national churches that trace their roots to the Church of England and the archbishop of Canterbury.

… 

In Virginia, the two large churches are voting on whether they want to report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.

[emphasis mine…]  So this is where they’re headed; into the arms to a man who has methodically goaded his country into a pogrom against gays.  But where else would a schism be likely to end up, that was funded largely by right wing American billionaires like Richard Ahmanson, a Christian Reconstructionist, who has previously endorsed the ritual stoning to death of homosexuals, though he says he now no longer considers it essential…

"I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony [the founder of the Christian Reconstructionist movement] seemed to think – and I’m not sure about this – that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned," he said. "I no longer consider that essential.

"It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," Ahmanson said. "But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity."

Well…there’s stumbling on such a country, and then there’s bankrolling one yourself.  The conservatives can make all the excuses they want for their decision to schism, but the staringly obvious fact is that they are ripping their church apart for nothing more righteous and noble then a bottomless hatred of homosexual people.  Nobody is forcing them into the arms of the man who wants to cleanse Nigeria of homosexuals, anymore then anyone was forcing them to take money from a man who still finds it "a little hard to say" that stoning them to death is immoral.  They’re going willingly.  Joyfully.  A ‘lifeboat’ Yates called it, who preaches to his faithful in a state that used to enforce a law forbidding bars and restaurants from serving known homosexuals, and which only last month passed a constitutional amendment that strips same sex couples of all legal rights.  But it isn’t enough that the state hates gay people as much as they do.  God has to hate them that much too.

When they tell you it’s not about hate, laugh in their faces and point to their new Moses and his promise land, where homosexuals cannot even sit down together in public without facing arrest.  Then point to their blood money.