Reply #8: Most of the people against women bishops are also against women priests [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

However, one can avoid women priests, either by serving in one of the dioceses that doesn't accept them, or by not accepting them in one's own parish or by moving to a different parish if you're a minority holdout against women priests.

The usual "theological" justification is that Jesus chose only male disciples. My counter to that is that is that in his day, most women were married and had children by their mid teens.

Anyway, while the sexist contingent can shut their eyes and pretend that women priests don't exist, bishops are another matter entirely. In the Church of England (Brits can correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall a Yes, Prime Minister episode on the subject), bishops are appointed by the government from among candidates nominated by the Church. It's thus possible for a diocese to have to accept a bishop it doesn't want. That's why women bishops per se have become a controversial issue in the UK.

In the U.S., the system is different. Dioceses elect their own bishops from among candidates nominated at large, so in the U.S., no diocese has gotten a woman bishop unless the majority of priests and lay people accepted the idea. What set the "conservatives" off here in the U.S. was the election of a woman presiding bishop, in other words, someone they can't ignore.

So as far as I'm concerned, there's no real theological justification for objection to women bishops apart from the objection to women priests in general. Good old-fashioned sexism is certainly a part of it, but where the manure hits the ventilation device is at the point where the individual sexist can no longer avoid women clerics: with the appointment of women bishops in the U.K. and with the election of a woman presiding bishop in the U.S.

By the way, the United Church of Canada is a union of all the mainline Protestant groups (Methodists, Presbyterians, UCC) that aren't Anglican or Lutheran. Anglicans in Canada are called...Anglicans.