Kismet

2014: Oh dear, Oh dear. We failed to heed the warning the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England gave us, and now look what’s happening

Gay Marriage: Must Try Harder

The Lion has Roared. The faith and order commission of the General Synod, no less, has uttered its mind on marriage equality.

Marriage is the faithful committed permanent and legally sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman central to the stability and health of human society

What would happen if we simply substituted "between two people"?

Well, very little has happened, actually, in jurisdictions that have done that.

Belgium remains, after ten years, a drably conventional place, where people are married and given in marriage.

In Belgium, Gay people are not forced to marry people of the opposite sex and pretend to be what they are not. A small number of them choose a life of marital commitment together. Er, that’s it.

But apparently this is what will happen in the UK:

When marriage is spoken of unclearly or misleadingly it distorts the way couples try to conduct their relationships and makes for frustration and disappointment. The reality of marriage between one man and one woman will not disappear as a result of any legislative change, for God has given us this gift and it will remain part of our  created human endowment. The disciplines of living in it may become more difficult to acquire and the path to fulfillment in marriage and in other relationships more difficult to find.

Really? How would that be? Has anyone ever met any couple to whom this happened?

I agree that broadening access to marriage to include gay people and abolishing the unclarity inherent in forcing them to pretend to be heterosexual in order to get married can only reduce confusion, frustration and disappointment all round.

Nobody is proposing gay relationships should be substituted for straight ones, merely treated equally.

Paragraph 8 is pure waffle:

The marvelous ordering of the created world has not lost its force for a generation made more aware than before by discoveries in physics and biology of the dynamic unfolding of the universe, the interplay between innovation and constancy, variation and intelligibility.

If the author of paragraph 26 which states “persons are not asexual” were to explore discoveries in biology they would learn that a tiny proportion, up to 1% of the population are, actually, asexual.

Paragraph 29 makes a clear and helpful claim that

In God's image we bring spiritual creativity to our natural endowment without denying or overthrowing it.

One would expect the author to recognise that for some people their natural endowment is gay. Someone in favour of equal marriage would agree. But hang on, the report goes on to imply that only heterosexuality is, actually, natural.

This is the crux of the argument and exposes its genteel homophobic assumptions. If gayness may be regarded, as a matter of fact, as part of the natural order, the whole argument of this paper works in the opposite direction to what it intended. It does not speak for all Christians, as it claims to, because many Christians do not regard gay people as in any way inferior.
The conviction they are equal arises from primary gospel values.

Whilst agreeing with 95% of what is said in this report about marriage, the whole thing unravels as an argument against marriage equality the moment one accepts that gay people are not freaks, crooks, or straight people being naughty. If you believe they are any or all of these things, most of its arguments stack up against equal marriage. If you don’t, they actually stack up in favour.

I recently met a Lesbian in church who was telling me that her worst experience of Church had been when it posed as the source of some cheesy form of pastoral care whilst continuing its essentially homophobic stance towards her personally.

Thus I quake in my boots when I read in the accompanying press release

this report also underlines the role of the Church in seeking to provide care, prayer, and compassion for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to receive the gift of marriage in the form that the Church has understood it and continues to uphold.

Many of my gay friends will find this tendentious statement wildly patronising and offensive. Offers of comfort from the very people whose homophobia caused the pain in the first place will not be received easily. If the Church wants to provide compassion, it can stop talking about gay people and start talking with them. It can demonstrate the genuinness of its care by ceasing to belittle and patronise them and start taking them seriously. If it wants to pray with them, this institution which cheerfully blesses nuclear submarines, hamsters and buckets of cement can start blessing their often stunning relationships.

Persecution, Paranoia and Pluralism for Pot-Plants

Holy Saturday brings what the Daily Mail calls an Astonishing attack on the Prime Minister by Lord Carey. I was not astonished. The timing is plainly the Daily Mail’s, to embarrass the government as much as possible. Apparently two thirds of Christians now feel they are a persecuted minority — or at least they did fifteen months ago when the fieldwork for this survey was conducted.

Since almost 60% of the population self-identified as Christians in the 2011 census, it's hard to see how the basic maths of this notion could possibly be substantiated. There are Christians in some parts of Africa and the Muslim world, for example, who actually do experience persecution. This does not consist of some politicians, including Christian politicians, disagreeing with them, but losing jobs, homes and freedom. Any comparison with them seems, to put it mildly, tacky.

Apparently UK persecution consists of having to tolerate the fact that many people don’t share their narrow interpretation of the Bible, including many if not most other Christians.

So what basis could there be for the factually tendentious feeling that Christians are persecuted in the UK? Perhaps top-shelf reactionary religion, in itself, can engender its own nightmares. I turned to the memoirs of Frank Schaeffer, talking about the anxieties of his Fundamentalist childhood:

We Schaeffers never compromised. At times it seemed that only God knew how important we were, how right, how pure.

But isolation and rejection by “The World” only confirmed our self-importance.

The sense of being like the tribes of Israel wandering the desert, with enemies on all sides, was the underlying reality of my childhood.

I think it was shared by my three sisters... Susan took grim satisfaction at the looming damnation of just about everyone but us. Debby wept and redoubled her efforts. Priscilla got nervous and threw up. I hid.

Conservative Christians are people of high integrity and seriousness. I believe them when they say they do experience  marginalisation. In the good old days their  social mores, backed by the criminal law and psychiatric practice, absolutely ruled the roost.

Cultural development since 1945, for better or worse, has left many conventionally minded Christians dazed and confused. A character in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger says of her father — “Poor Daddy. He’s a pot-plant left over from the Edwardian high summer who can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more.”

Where does this marginalisation leave them? basically in the same position as the rest of the population.  Conservative Christians have a right to hold and express their views and be heard with respect like anyone else. That does not require everyone else to agree with them. Some people, most people, including other Christians, may well disagree with them. Nor does their right to be heard give them moral high ground from which to curtail the rights and dignities of others. They simply have to take their chances with everybody else,a nd be judged on the merits of their case.

That is not persecution. It’s reality. It’s Democracy.