Updated Saturday afternoon
See previous articles here, here, and here.
Andrew Brown has commented about this at Comment is free: Belief in The latest hate speech from the Church of Nigeria.
Pluralist has commented on his blog in Expel the Nigerian Church – Time to Move On.
Episcopal Café has a further article, Nigeria’s legal system adequate for persecution.
The US State Department report mentioned there can be found at 2008 Human Rights Report: Nigeria.
The current legislation is not the same as that proposed in 2006 which was also commended by the Church of Nigeria.
There is no mention of this matter at the website of CANA, but the front page does have this in the sidebar:
Every person is made in the image of God and deserves to be treated that way.
-the Rt Rev’d. Martyn Minns
Episcopal Café points out that Martyn Minns and Robert Duncan are among the bishops at the Church of Nigeria House of Bishops meeting, read Meeting of the CON Standing Committee: PRIMATE’S OPENING REMARK [sic] from the official website of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion):
We are glad to welcome back home our CANA bishop, Martyn Minns. With us at this meeting is Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh. Bob leads the Common Cause Partnership that will soon metamorphose against all odds into a new Anglican Province in North America.
Having read the new Bill and reflecting on the horrors the last Bill contained I think this is a substantial victory and a deep humiliation for the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion). I say this not only because the new draft Bill has been stripped of its draconian measures but because there was convincing evidence to suggest that the last Bill and its host of outrageous measures had been originally drafted in the offices of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion). It seems that Akinola having intervened in the UsofA was deeply worried that TEC might fund a gay friendly… Read more »
My take is that Akinola’s church is pandering to homophobes — in other words, his church is OF this world because it plays to the prejudices in the society in which it lives. His church is in a race to the bottom with the pentecostal churches, and the Catholic church in their competition with Islam in Nigeria. I rather doubt his church wrote the earlier version — just jumped on the bandwagon, and tried to pretend to be leading it.
[If this is a “victory”, Martin, I think it’s a Pyrrhic one at best.]
Can someone in the Anglican blogiverse please start one of those web-clocks wherein we can measure the duration of the silence from Messrs Minns and Duncan about this?
“Can someone in the Anglican blogiverse please start one of those web-clocks wherein we can measure the duration of the silence from Messrs Minns and Duncan about this?”
An excellent idea, but don’t hold your breath waitiing for such. And don’t hold your breath waiting for comment for the ABC – he’s too busy writing lofty treatises about economics.
It is rather curious that the Archbishop in Nigeria is supporting legislation against the LGBT community – a community which he has already declared doesn’t actually exist in Nigeria! Perhaps this sort of ephemeral ‘ghost-dancing’ is one of the more questionable preoccupations of His Grace at this time – when other, much more life-threatening things; like starvation and HIV-Aids, and an escalating national and local ethos of endemic corruption, ought to claim his and other religious people’s attention. The oft-delivered excuse of having to conform to other religions’ (e.g Muslim) sensitivities on sex and gender issues must surely be a… Read more »