That started with Queen Elizabeth, who told her bishops to shut up about some of the Calvinist ideas that were popular at that time, because she wanted the Church of England to be as broad and to include as many people as possible. The so-called Elizabethan Settlement.
On the whole, it worked fairly well. Through much of the twentieth century (and earlier) you had three basic groups of Anglicans: High Church, Evangelical, and Broad Church. And this diversity was accommodated by not defining things too carefully.
But this approach broke down when the crazies took over the Church in England and America. It’s all very well to have a Red Dean of Canterbury, but it’s another matter to have a heretical Archbishop of Canterbury, which is what Rowan Williams is, although at least he tries to hide it. And when Tony Blair recommended that the Queen should appoint him to the job, he knew exactly what he was doing.
In America, the last two leading bishops have been open heretics. The appointment of an actively homosexual bishop of New Hampshire, who had earlier divorced his wife and dumped his kids, crossed a new boundary. It’s one thing to have a bishop come out of the closet and admit to being a homosexual. Oops! But it’s quite another thing to deliberately appoint a flaming homosexual as bishop for no other reason than that he IS a homosexual. That crosses the boundary.
Rembert Weakland was a homosexual Catholic bishop who caused a lot of grief. But he wasn’t openly appointed for that reason. And when the truth became impossible to ignore, he was removed. The Catholic leadership has not acted as decisively as it should, and some bishops (like Weakland) were outright bad, but it has not deliberately promoted heresy and sin in the same way that the leaders of ECUSA have.
And saying that ol' Vicki Gene was appointed strictly BECAUSE he was homosexual is quite accurate. I remember somebody saying at the time that if he had left his wife and two little girls to run off with the (female) church secretary, he not only would never have been made a bishop, he probably would have been inhibited and removed from his parish.