The election of Mary Glasspool as assistant Bishop of Los Angeles will be the end of the Anglican Communion.

Ms Glasspool is a practising lesbian who has lived for twenty years with her partner.

This election comes six years after the election of active homosexual Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire.

The unequivocal witness of the Judeo-Christian tradition over nearly four thousand years is that homosexual acts are wrong. This was the unchallenged view in the Christian church until about fifty years ago.

Conservatives say the sudden, culturally driven rejection of long-held beliefs about leadership and sexuality is not only intrinsically wrong, but makes it impossible to comunicate the faith with anny confidence. If the church now says it has been wrong about these key things for the last 2,000 years, why should anyone believe anything it says now?

Muriel Porter claims that we conservatives have talked about damage to the Anglican Communion before, and threatened to leave before before, and so can be safely ignored in any current debates.

It is true that there have been no major public splits in the Anglican Church of Australia.

It is also true that there have been dramatic declines in church attendance over the lasty thirty years.

If life expectancies had not increased by twenty years or so over the last century, Anglican churches around the country would be empty.

There are some exceptions – Sydney and its satellites. But Sydney stands outside the mainstream of the Anglican Church of Australia. That is not a criticism!

Many thousands of men and women who have been Anglicans all their lives have left in despair rather than form new semi-Anglican denominations.

If Muriel Porter means this process is likely to continue no matter how far the church strays from its moorings, then she is probably right.