I didn’t post this yesterday, and I’m reluctant to post it now because I don’t want to make anyone’s post-Christmas blues any worse.  But the New York Times yesterday put up an article on the spiritual leader of the conservative Episcopalians that really says it all…

The way he tells the story, the first and only time Archbishop Peter J. Akinola knowingly shook a gay person’s hand, he sprang backward the moment he realized what he had done.

Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, right, internationally known for his harsh stance against homosexuality, with bishops in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2005.

Archbishop Akinola, the conservative leader of Nigeria’s Anglican Church who has emerged at the center of a schism over homosexuality in the global Anglican Communion, re-enacted the scene from behind his desk Tuesday, shaking his head
in wonder and horror.

“This man came up to me after a service, in New York I think, and said, ‘Oh, good to see you bishop, this is my partner of many years,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘Oh!’ I jumped back.”

Archbishop Akinola, a man whose international reputation has largely been built on his tough stance against homosexuality, has become the spiritual head of 21 conservative churches in the United States. They opted to leave the Episcopal
Church over its decision to consecrate an openly gay bishop and allow churches to bless same-sex unions. Among the eight Virginia churches to announce they had joined the archbishop’s fold last week are The Falls Church and Truro Church,
two large, historic and wealthy parishes.

In a move attacked by some church leaders as a violation of geographical boundaries, Archbishop Akinola has created an offshoot of his Nigerian church in North America for the discontented Americans…

And they’re contented with him?  Well…yes.  Yes they are…

He supports a bill in Nigeria’s legislature that would make homosexual sex and any public expression of homosexual identity a crime punishable by five years in prison.

The bill ostensibly aims to ban gay marriage, but it includes measures so extreme that the State Department warned that they would violate basic human rights. Strictly interpreted, the bill would ban two gay people from going out
to dinner or seeing a movie together.

It could also lead to the arrest and imprisonment of members of organizations providing all manner of services, particularly those helping people with AIDS.

It’s worth remembering that this was once the situation for gay people here in America.  Never mind the sodomy laws and sex…you could literally be rounded up and herded into paddy wagons and then to jail simply for being in a bar or club that the police thought to be a homosexual gathering place.  Many states, including Virginia, had or still have laws on the books forbidding bars and restaurants from serving known homosexuals.  And despite the supreme court decision in Lawrence verses v. Texas, Virginia is Still trying to enforce in some measure, its sodomy laws.  Without a doubt, the priests and common folk of those Virginia churches that voted to schism, did so with a longing for the good old days when a good homosexual was either a dead one, or one that was in jail. 

But it gets even better.  Look at this:

One of Archbishop Akinola’s principal arguments, often heard from other conservatives as well, is that Christianity in Nigeria, a country where religious violence has killed tens of thousands in the past decade, must guard its flank lest Islam overtake it. “The church is in the midst of Islam,” he said. “Should the church in this country begin to teach that it is appropriate, that it is right to have same sex unions and all that, the church will simply die.”

Wonderful.  The reason we have to persecute homosexuals isn’t so much a biblical necessity, as a political one.  Hatred of homosexuals is popular, and if we teach peace and goodwill and not casting the first stone and loving your neighbor and all the rest of that politically incorrect crap some radical named Jesus once taught, we’ll loose ground to the Islamicists who will gladly keep on playing on the hatreds of the masses.  Someone should ask the Archbishop…no, wait, someone should ask the Virginia Episcopalians if this means they have to hate Jews as much as the Islamicists do too. 

This is the man they’ve thrown themselves at, because their church started treating the gay people among them as something other then human garbage.  This is their new Moses, delivering them to their promise land where homosexuals cannot so much as sit down together in public to eat without being arrested.  But where persecution toward one group is made righteous, none are safe.  The heathens are the people in the church across the street.  The witch is your neighbor, who also sees a witch when they look back at you.  When Jesus said we have to love our neighbor, I don’t think he was suggesting it as a feel-good exercise.  Africa has suffered one horrific wave of genocide after another in recent decades, and it wasn’t because there was too much love to go around.  It isn’t your flank you have to guard, it’s your soul.  Evil rests within us all.  The good person is the one who will not unleash it within themselves, or in others.  When they speak in Virginia of their devotion to the faith, and to Christ, laugh in their faces.