A handful of other dioceses have planned special meetings in response to the General Convention in the weeks ahead. Some dioceses and parishes have already decided for now to withhold payments that would have gone to national church headquarters.

Episcopalians who oppose Robinson's confirmation will gather Oct. 7-9 in Dallas, at a meeting organized by the conservative American Anglican Council, to decide their collective response.Conservative Rev. John Howe, bishop of Central Florida's Episcopal diocese says he will skip the Dallas meeting and take his complaints directly to London, where he will meet with leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion, many of whom say they are also considering severing ties with the Episcopal Church over its decision to approve Robinson.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, has called world Anglican leaders to an unprecedented meeting to be held Oct. 15 and 16 in London to discuss the controversial decision. The Anglican Communion's 38 leaders, called primates, could decide to discipline or divide the US Episcopal Church.

It could happen. The UK's Telegraph offers an unflattering, though many may say accurate, depiction of the Anglican right-wing:

The forces of conservatism are an alliance of American Right-wingers and African evangelicals. The Americans believe that homosexuality can be cured by therapy; the Africans that it can be cured by exorcism. In fact, for the fundamentalist Africans, homosexuals simply don't exist except in Western Europe. It is all extraordinarily like traditional biblical anti-Semitism, which held that God's plan for these unhappy people was conversion. In the meantime, there may be some good individual gays, as there were good "court Jews", but that doesn't mean you would want your son to marry one.

Not all Anglican-Episcopal voices are calling for punishment. Yesterday, the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska chose not to pass a resolution denouncing the Bishop of New Hampshire's confirmation at its convention in Juneau. The move may lead some Alaska congregations to split from the church, but then again, it may not.

Conservative Rev. James Basinger, rector of All Saints' Episcopal Church in Anchorage, told the Juneau Empire that he will attend the meeting of right-wing clergy in Dallas and hinted that schism is not a sure thing. "We're still divided over the issue of homosexual practice," he said, "but there is also a tremendous desire to be unified."

Pope John Paul II, purportedly a man of God and of love, stuck his nose into the Episcopalians' debate to threaten the notion of Christian unity. Yesterday, the pontiff told the Archbishop of Canterbury that some Anglicans' acceptance of openly gay clergy members presented "new and serious difficulties" in relations between the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. The New York Times reports:

"As we give thanks for the progress that has already been made, we must also recognize that new and serious difficulties have arisen on the path to unity," John Paul said, reading from prepared remarks in the papal library.

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