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Nigerian
Archbishop to install American anti-gay bishop
29 Apr 2007- Archbishop Peter J.
Akinola's unprecedented visit to the Washington, D.C. area this week to
install an American bishop in a renegade branch of the Episcopal Church
of North America is both a contradiction and an insult to freedom-loving
men and women of peace and love who believe in human dignity,
self-determination, and the humanity of Jesus Christ.
The visit is also
theologically strategic in the church-sense; certainly not in the
Christian-sense. That is, Akinola who hails from Nigeria, a nation
stubbornly committed to human rights abuses, plans to install Martyn
Minns as Bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America: an
illegitimate, break-away group associated with the Nigerian Anglican
communion.
Akinola hopes that
Minns will provide leadership and direction to radical conservative
Anglicans at odds with the Episcopal Church's welcoming stance on
homosexuality, diversity, inclusiveness, and tolerance.
In the Sunday
(April 29, 2007) edition of The New York Times, Bishop Katherine
Jefferts Schori is quoted as stating that Akinola's unofficial visit
"...would only serve to heighten current tensions" and would be "regettable."
Akinola presides
over the largest region in the worldwide Anglican communion. He leads an
arch-conservative movement that has actively sought to ally Anglicans in
developing regions with religious rightists in North America whose
singular message, as servants of Christ, is to exclude those at variance
with heterosexuality and to condemn lesbians, gay men and other sexual
minorities from the beneficence of the light and liberation of Jesus
Christ.
It is remarkable
that an African archbishop would cross the Atlantic Ocean to preside
over the installation of a bishop whose ascendency rests solely on the
exclusion of an entire class of persons simply for loving in accordance
with their nature.
Moreover, it is
ironic that Akinola, a Nigerian, ought to be directing the
inner-machinations of a church long associated with the national
identity of sovereign democracies around the world. Nigeria has wrestled
with sectarian divisions, including violent altercations, between its
Muslim north and the largely Christian southeast.
From a political
standpoint the Nigerian human rights record is even more grim: in
February, 2007 the National Assembly held public discussions on a bill
aimed at banning homosexuality. Life---presumably an essential human and
Christian value---is already harsh for gay Nigerians without additional
legal prohibitions: it is punishable by imprisonment in the south and by
death in the north.
Indeed, Archbishop
Akinola and Anglicans in Nigeria might be better served if the bishop
stayed home and reflected on the fundamental nature of Christianity,
rather than flying to Washington to fan the flames of hatred and
division among American fundamentalists.
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