"How absorbed can we be, to be fighting over this when people are dying everywhere?"

"We have allowed the conservative religious right to take our Bible hostage, and I think it is time we took it back," said Robinson.

Robinson cited the Acts of the Apostles, likening himself to the lame beggar lying outside the temple gates who is miraculously healed and walks into the temple after Peter and John bid him to rise up in the name of Jesus. "I know what it feels like to be inside the temple. Once out, once liberated, you're never going to be satisfied being outside."

The bishop has repeatedly refused to give interviews, but said he will do so after the Lambeth/Eames report has been released.

That the bishop can separate public and private morality and then distort and exegete Scripture to fit his own homoerotic ends and needs, is too disingenuous by half.

That social justice should be permitted to trump his sexual misbehavior is every mother's worst nightmare.

He talks about the global impact of AIDS while failing to identify that the primary cause of AIDS is anal sex in the West and heterosexual promiscuity in the Two-Thirds world! It is sheer hypocrisy of him to separate the AIDS holocaust from what he himself practices!

In fact it is his unrepentant behavior that will most likely destroy the Anglican Communion as we know it.

Not since there was a call to action by the Anglican Synod in Canada in 1865 to deal with Bishop Colenso of Natal, who, in ministering to African natives refused to make polygamous men give up their extra wives prior to baptism, have we had a scenario in which a Presiding Bishop lied to his fellow primates about what he would not do, then proceed to consecrate a homoerotic bishop, and then whine and scream about his pain when he is called on the carpet for doing it.

There has been no more fractious act in modern ecclesiastical history that has the capacity to rent asunder 77 million Anglicans than his consecration.

And Robinson calls it a "distraction."

In the next 35 days we will know just how big or small a "distraction" it has caused, and how big the ecclesiastical fissure will be as a result of his consecration.

Certainly the realignment currently underway in the Episcopal Church will not slow down whatever the Lambeth/Eames Commission report contains, and the momentum is only gathering in one ECUSA diocese after another for change. Resistance is useless; it is resulting only in lawsuits and more.

We cannot go back for sure, but the alignment is not going to stop going forward, Griswold's denial notwithstanding. The way forward is fraught with danger, possibly death, but so was the road to Calvary.

END