Preferring me dead

The worst thing in listening to a debate about the Anglican Covenant is that there generally comes a point when I realise that there are speakers who would prefer me to be dead. Often those speakers would think of themselves as liberals rather than conservatives too.

Perhaps it would be easier on your ears if I said that there are those who would prefer me and people like me never to have existed. When you are on the receiving end of it though, the distinction between the two is not really one that’s easy to make.

Is it any easier on your ears for that to be expressed as a wish that gay people had never come out, never raised their head above the pulpit, denied their existence to themselves never mind to other Anglicans and all for the sake of the Anglican Communion?

I find it difficult to write about what it is like to listen to these debates. For there are no real words to describe what it is like to know that there are people, good people, in most other respects liberal people, who would prefer your non-existence to your existence. There are really no words to express what that is like.

I listened to the debate about the Anglican Communion on Wednesday which took place on Wednesday in the Church of England. Clearly there are very many Anglicans in England who would choose a faux church unity (a unity which doesn’t even remotely exist) rather than stand up for the well-being, the ministries, the lives, the souls of gay people in our churches. If its not done in the name of church unity and the Anglican Communion, its being done in the name of supporting the Archbishop of Canterbury. Its a simple request – support the Archbishop, he needs our support – the gays are expendable again.

Whilst I don’t like the values, morals and mores of the conservative evangelicals in all this, at least they make sense to me. At least there is a coherence. There is logic in it, however perverse. There is little logic in the apparently moderate voices who make that choice – to sacrifice gay lives, gay ministries, gay well-being, the possibility of gay role-models, often gay friends, for the fantasy of preserving a Communion that has already split.

The price was never worth the candle anyway.

The lowest point for me in the debate on Wednesday was hearing someone (I can’t remember who it was) defending the Covenant by saying that we needed to be able to throw churches out of the Communion. And he gave an example, saying that we needed a mechanism for removing any church which, for example, was complicit, so complicit in advocating racial prejudice that it was supporting state sponsored apartheid. Such a church would have to be expelled, for to do such calculated harm to people of a different race would take that church beyond the pale – they would no longer be worthy of being thought of as Anglicans.

Yet, in all this there was no mention of the churches which exist in our communion which have advocated precisely that harm to those of us who are gay. No mention of the Anglican voices from Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda which in league with others in their society would do gay people harm, would deny their existance, would prefer them to have no voice, would prefer me to be dead.

Such voices, such churches, must be kept at the table. Such voices, such churches must be included in. If their prejudice involved racial violence, they would be excluded. But its the gays instead, so we must change all our rules of how our churches function to include those churches in. The gays are expendable after all. We are apparently, a price worth paying.

I have no real words to describe what it is like to hear these debates. I have no real words to describe what this does to my well-being. I have no real words to describe what I think this does to my soul. I have no words to describe what it does to God.