A Reason for Pride

Rev. Astrid Storm
Posted June 20, 2007 10:06 PM (EST)
The Huffington Post

I didn't miss the significance of having to walk past the Stonewall Inn en route to a talk at the Church of St. Luke-in-the-Fields by the founder of Nigeria's first GLBT organization, Changing Attitudes Nigeria. The talk was the first of several Gay Pride events sponsored by this lovely little Episcopal church in the West Village of New York City, a church well known for its activism around gay and lesbian issues, and tonight it was full of men and women eager to hear a different voice coming from Anglicans in Nigeria.

Even as I've kept up with all the fracas in the Anglican Communion over gay and lesbians (about which I blogged here before), I'd only recently heard of Davis Mac-Iyalla, which, as he clarified tonight, is probably due to the prodigious efforts by the Anglican Church in Nigeria to deny his existence. As one Nigerian bishop said, "There are no gay and lesbians in Nigeria *not* to have as members of the church." And specifically of Mr. Mac-Iyalla, the Nigerian church issued a press release shortly after the successful gathering of over 1000 Nigerian gays and lesbians stating that he's not an Anglican, he's not gay, and that the group (despite some press coverage of it elsewhere -- including in the NYTimes) never, in fact, met.

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