Those were also the days when people on the left would do somersaults to persuade clergy--any ecclesiastic, really, to say nothing of someone high in the Episcopal hierarchy--to bring the imprimatur of God to the cause, rather like the politicized God of the American right today. But we never hoped that these prelates would levitate the crowd. About religion and politics, we were cynical, or, let us say, instrumental.

The Church of England has retained these Formularies to this day (2005) but the Episcopal Church rejected them as worship and doctrine standards by majority votes in General Convention in 1976 and then again in 1979. Since then the Articles have been treated as a museum piece without any authority in America. They have been effectively replaced by the radically liberal "Outline of the Faith" printed inside the 1979 Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church.

I certainly don't know if fallen homosexuals are more inclined to be unchaste than fallen heterosexuals. "The key point seems to be that homosexuals possess 'a serious personality disorder which detracts from their ability to serve as ministers.'

Nearly 45 people, many of them deputies to the next General Convention, met at Christ Church New Brunswick, New Jersey, to discuss the report that was requested by the primates of the Anglican Communion at their meeting in October 2003 and completed one year later.