Dispatches from The Great Divide
1. Two weeks ago, the Episcopal Church voted to give general authorization for same sex weddings to be conducted in Episcopal Churches. Having followed this story as an outsider, the outcome was not a surprise--all of the commentary I had read suggested it was going to pass. What was surprising, at least for me, was the margin of victory. Out of 160 Episcopal bishops, only 26 voted no, with five abstentions; it other words it passed with an 64 percent margin of victory, which is an enormous number. But it is actually even bigger than that--if you take out the retired bishops, the assisting and auxiliary bishops, and the the bishops from places outside the United States that are part of the Episcopal Church (all of whom are included in the vote), you end up with only eight dicocesan bishops voting no out of 99 dioceses in the 50 States. That's a land slide in by any measure. I also found the reactions from the other elements of the Anglican ...
