Among a field of six candidates, ECUSA clergy and lay leaders of the Diocese of Los Angeles elevated a woman engaged in a 21-year sexually deviant lifestyle to its highest ordained ministry, as leader of 70,000 churchgoers.
UPDATE 12/7/09: Episcopal Church USA 'Thumbs Nose' at Anglican Communion
-- From "L.A. Episcopal Diocese elects openly gay bishop" by Larry B. Stammer and Paul Pringle, Los Angeles Times 12/6/09
[Mary D.] Glasspool's election to fill one of two openings for suffragan, or assistant, bishop followed the selection Friday of the Rev. Canon Diane M. Jardine Bruce, 53, the rector of a San Clemente church.
The two became the first women elected as bishops of the diocese in its 114-year history.
Glasspool is the first openly gay priest to be elected bishop since the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire in 2003.
Robinson's election threw the church and the Anglican Communion into an uproar, prompting the members of dozens of conservative parishes and four dioceses to vote to leave the church. It also led to the moratorium on additional gay bishops.
The Rev. Kendall Harmon, canon theologian for the South Carolina diocese, said in a statement that Saturday's decision "represents an intransigent embrace of a pattern of life Christians throughout history and the world have rejected as against biblical teaching. . . . It will continue to do damage to the Anglican Communion and her relationship with our ecumenical partners."
Members of the four breakaway [ECUSA] dioceses and some of the dissident parishes aligned themselves with conservative Anglican bishops in Africa and South America.
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