It is often noted that the Scottish Episcopal Church is very much in favour of the Anglican Communion. What is noted in public slightly less often but which is no less important to remember, is that it is not in favour of the Anglican Communion at any cost. Our dismissal of the Anglican Covenant showed that very clearly.
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s statements yesterday in a radio phone-in, which seemed to imply that opening marriage to same-sex couples would lead to murder in Africa, take us into a very murky ethical place. I have to admit that my heart sank when I heard it. We have had more than enough of this kind of thing from inhabitants of Lambeth Palace. It seems very clear to me that in this case, Justin Welby is wrong.
Generally speaking, I thought it was a poor radio performance. Personally I never do radio phone-ins. It is a format that is hard to do well with. The Archbishop seemed nervous (perhaps rightly) and ill-prepared.
The particularly offensive thing which he has said is to suggest that there should be no movement on opening marriage to same-sex couples in the church because that could lead to Anglicans being murdered in Africa. He told a story of standing beside a mass grave and being told that the people had been killed by local opposition forces.
I’ve stood by a graveside in Africa of a group of Christians who’d been attacked because of something that had happened far far away in America, and they were attacked by other people – because of that a lot of them had been killed.
Inevitably, I’ve seen US friends posting a great deal online asking whether the Archbishop was trying to lay the blame for dead Africans at the doors of The [US-based] Episcopal Church. It is a repugnant suggestion and comes just before Justin Welby is due to visit that church next week. The Archbishop needs to justify his claim or withdraw it. It is a vile suggestion for a cleric to make of another part of the church.
I find the ethics of this very straightforward. It seems to me that the ethics of the Anglican Communion, of the churches in the UK, of the churches in North America, of the governments of the nations in which we live – these cannot be determined by those who bear the bullet and the bomb. The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to have been suggesting that our policies should be dictated by murderers.
In some ways this isn’t new. Justin Welby’s view is probably not that different to that of Rowan Williams and we’ve heard the same stuff coming from the Mothers’ Union for years. More than once I’ve heard it said that Rowan Williams was desperate for Jeffrey John to withdraw from being a bishop because he feared the consequences of violence in other countries. It can seem plausible put like that, can’t it? Who wouldn’t want to stop violence?
The trouble is, it is an attempt to deal with the reality and horror of violence by appeasing the violent. It is giving those who murder, a moral authority that they can never be allowed to hold.
Let us presume for a moment, for the sake of argument that the story told to Justin Welby is essentially true – that there is a mass grave in Africa caused solely by positive attitudes to gay people (a gay person?) in the US. If that is true then the only Christian response is to condemn the violence and do so publicly, loudly and endlessly. You don’t keep your mouth shut and try to turn the clock back on progressive attitudes on the other side of the world as a response to it.
The claim is that these people were killed because their opponents believed that if they left Christians alive then they would be “made gay”. If this is true then those people were killed as a result of homophobia. It is homophobia of the worst, most violent sort that killed the people in the Archbishop’s story.
You condemn it, Archbishop. That’s what you are called to do.
This feels very personal for me. In my work at St Mary’s I encounter very frequently people who come from Africa including some of the countries that are being discussed around the world because of this current conversation. I also encounter those who are gay and lesbian and particularly, I help those amongst them who want to get married, to get hitched. Am I supposed to prejudice the rights, livelihoods and wellbeing of one group over another because someone threatens one particular group with violence?
We are our own Anglican Communion at St Mary’s and I couldn’t possible care only for the rights of one group. We all have a right to life, to security, to live our lives to the full.
When you encounter violence, you condemn it, Archbishop. When you encounter murder, you condemn it, Archbishop. When you encounter homophobia, you condemn it, Archbishop.
You don’t appease it, Justin Welby. You condemn it.
Why should any of us in any land expect anything less of you?
Thank you for your comment, Chigozie. I don’t agree with it and a lot of people reading this here won’t either. You’ll find quite a lot of the reasons that I don’t agree with it by reading other posts and answers that people have given on the blog. (Search for LGBT if you are interested in similar posts).
However, I think I need to make clear that the point of my original post was not about whether homosexuality was good or bad but whether people are being killed in Africa and thrown into mass graves because of the opinions or actions of Anglicans in the USA.
For any subsequent comments on this thread, I would be grateful if people would refrain from posting single verses of scripture in comments as though they prove an argument. I’ve more respect for the Bible than to think that is ever true and I have a longstanding policy of not allowing such comments to distract us from discussing the topic in question.
thank you of speaking the truth without complexity
Kelvin, you wrote:
“Inevitably, I’ve seen US friends posting a great deal online asking whether the Archbishop was trying to lay the blame for dead Africans at the doors of The [US-based] Episcopal Church. It is a repugnant suggestion and comes just before Justin Welby is due to visit that church next week. The Archbishop needs to justify his claim or withdraw it. It is a vile suggestion for a cleric to make of another part of the church.”
I don’t think Justin mentioned The Episcopal Church ONCE in his interview. Perhaps you are the one who needs to withdraw the suggestion Justin was signalling out TEC?
No Peter. The Archbishop very clearly indicated that he was talking about America and the general context for this was whether or not Anglicans should affirm marriage being opened to same-sex couples. I’m asking the same questions that many others are asking and I stand by what I’ve said.
I’m afraid the only thing that jumps from “America” to “TEC are responsible” is your desire to be offended. If you think that’s what he meant, ask him to clarify.
But you know what, when it comes to a choice between allowing someone in a civil partnership to be called “married” (but adding no legal rights whatsoever) or seeing hundreds of African Christians murdered, I feel 1 Corinthians 10 calling.
I don’t derive my ethics from the Bible, Peter. And even if I did, I don’t think that the Epistle to the Corinthians justifies appeasing terrorists.
“I don’t derive my ethics from the Bible”
And there we have it.
Scripture, Tradition and REASON is our source of ethics as Anglicans, Peter O. Or do you accept Psalm 137:9, Sola Scriptura, for your ethics? [“Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!”]
Peter,
“when it comes to a choice”…
Is there any actual evidence that such a linear choice exists?
Has anyone done proper research into why (extremely conservative and anti gay) Christians are being killed in Africa and have they established a clear link to more liberal theologies by (slightly less anti gay) Christian churches in the West?
As for marriages not giving partners more rights than CPs, that is only true with the UK. CPs aren’t portable, marriage is. As more and more countries have marriage equality this matters, because there are fewer with domestic partnership arrangements and these arrangements do not all have the same legal content or standing.
It is only correct that the Government should try to afford all its citizens the same legal protection abroad.
Let’s take the second point first. Can you give me an example of a country where (i) a civil partnership in England and Wales would be treated domestically as a Civil Union and a same-sex marriage would be treated domestically as being as a marriage AND (ii) there is a substantial difference to the rights afforded by a Civil Union and a Marriage.
As for the first point, I defer to the Archbishop.
Peter, forgive me if for a minute I get hung up on a technicality. If referring to married same-sex couples in England, the word married no longer belongs in parentheses.
Yes, you are correct. Why are you telling me this?
I guess Beth isn’t referring to parentheses at all but sneer quotes = “marriage” rather than marriage.
I’m very clearly not using them as sneer quotes. Can we all please learn some basic English syntax and get back to the point.
Apologies. I did, as Kelvin suggests, mean quotation marks in whichever form you were choosing to use them. You’re right, I suppose, that it isn’t the point, except that I call attention to it because by using them you perpetuate the idea that marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman is somehow different to marriage between two people of opposite genders, which it isn’t, any more, and I think getting that part clear is half the battle to realising that it isn’t okay to tell people that their marriage to one another has caused people to be murdered.
Indeed – the difference between being married and being allowed to be referred to as being married.
So Beth, would you like me to call you “a woman who doesn’t understand when quotations are used to indicate speech” or “a woman who tries to read the worst possible motive into what someone she disagrees with writes”?
Have I made my point yet? I’m still waiting for the withdrawal of the allegation that I used the construct “marriage” to demean same-sex marriage.
Peter
I don’t think Beth’s hunch that you were using sneer quotes is unreasonable. I read it that way myself. After all the sentence in question reads perfectly well without them.
viz:
You must have had some reason for putting the word in quotation marks but you’ve now made your point that you didn’t mean it to be read in that way. Thank you for the clarification.
Peter, would you suggest we appease a mob on an issue you disagree with (say a demand that Christians convert)?
If not, this isn’t really about making sacrifices to appease terrorists, it’s using that as a pretext.
“Indeed – the difference between being married and being allowed to be referred to as being married.”
It’s the other way round. It’s about being married and still allowing others to refer to us as being “married”.
Could he have been referring to Scott Lively?
Tim,
he could have. Or he could have referred right back to the consecration of Gene Robinson, to TEC blessing same sex marriages, to the consecration of Mary Glasspool – in fact, to any decent, honest and honourable Christian response that ever came out of TEC.
Once he refers clearly to Scott Lively we’ll know he’s finally got it.
Chigozie I’m very glad to hear that you respect the commandment ‘thou shallt not kill’ and that you have shown yourself willing to enter into discussion over this very controversial topic. I pray that more of your countrymen follow your good example of respect for life, and of intelligent and informed discussion, in all its diversity.
Peter,
Canada has marriage equality but no civil partnerships. When my wife and I visited friends there some years ago our relationship was not legally recognised. If one of us had been taken seriously ill the other one would not have been considered her legal next of kin.
The same happened when we went to Spain on holiday after the introduction of marriage equality there.
Thankfully, that will no longer happen once we have been able to upgrade our CP to marriage.
As for deferring to the Archbishop, he hasn’t pointed us to any research either, just to some throw away comments he was told at a shocking graveside.
Obviously, I want to engage with his argument as constructively as possible, but in order to do that we need first to establish whether he actually has a point or whether his understandable shock has clouded his rational thinking for a moment and he has responded emotionally without first ascertaining that what he was told is factually true.
Hincks vs Gellado rather settled the matter in Canada didn’t it? As for Spain, Civil Partnerships have been recognised there since 2007.
The point is what happens on the ground, in doctors’s surgeries etc. If you can’t tick the “married” box you get treated differently.
Yes, you can quote laws and you can argue it all out later, but that cuts no ice when you’re faced with people who don’t know the law and whose friendly responses you depend on at the time.
I’m really glad that this whole mess is now finally over and that married means married in name as well as in reality.
“And there we have it”. (Mr Ould)
I have been engaged in the thread of this blog but I’m confused by this statement. What is the “it” and what do we have?
That Kelvin doesn’t get his ethics from the Bible.
Just as a note, I don’t either. If I’ve got important questions to ask myself a book badly translated by 2000 years worth of church committees is hardly likely to be my first point of call. Especially as 2/3rds of it refers to people of the Jewish faith.
Which I’ve been accused of being (a lapsed member of and incorrectly), once.
“Can we all please learn some basic English syntax and get back to the point.”
The point was not whether we “needed” marriage equality and it wasn’t even whether there was a direct link between a married gay couple in Britain leading to Christian deaths in Sudan.
The point was “even if that was proven, even if there was such a potential link now, what would be the appropriate Christian response to this”?
And that is a very serious question.
And Kelvin’s point that you condemn violence unequivocally, wherever and however it raises its ugly head is a very powerful one.
The second question is whether in the long term, it is better to give in to bullies and continue to treat your own people as moral inferiors, or whether it wouldn’t be better to push even harder for gay equality here to show that there is absolutely nothing to fear from gay people?
If, as Tobias Haller suggests, the link between the position of the CoE and what is happening in Africa is homophobia, then one has to seriously wonder whether more homophobia here will be part of the solution or whether it won’t simply perpetuate the problem.
So you’ve now dropped the idea that your civil partnership wouldn’t be recognised overseas unless it was a marriage?
Er, no, I thought I made that point. Based entirely on my own experience (in Spain, where I even speak enough of the language to make the legal point at the time).
I honoured your request to get back to what the original point of Kelvin’s post was about.
Would you care to do that too?
Syntax, Mr Ould, the grammatical structure of sentences, is not the same as punctuation (which covers quotation marks and parentheses among other points). Perhaps you need to learn that.
Several years ago I attended Synod of the Anglican Church of Cyprus and the Gulf when a priest condemned The Episcopal Church for inciting violence against Anglicans because of the Ordination of Gays and Lesbians in New Hampshire. I reminded the Synod that Matthew Shepherd (who had been confirmed in Cyprus) was a few years later the victim of a hate crime in Wyoming and that his murder was an example of the intolerance we should be condemning throughout the world. Instead of denouncing the oppressors, the church ends up condemning the victims of injustice whilst justifying the perpetrators of hate crimes.
To pour oil on troubled waters, here’s a lovely contribution to this acrimonious debate: over on Peter Ould’s blog, there’s a nice young man who’s found healing in the form of his transformation from (basically) Blanche Dubois to John Wayne. Now we can all agree, surely, that this can only be a Good Thing. Why rub people’s faces in it and, anyway, who wants to depend on the kindness of strangers, when you can just shoot them? But how do we all do it? Here’s how
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuASKA1yxp8
Do try this at home – and why not sashay down to communion next Sunday just like this? 🙂
Alan – I’ve approved this comment but please post any further comments relating to Peter’s blog over on Peter’s blog. I’m sure he would prefer to engage over there.
Alan,
When you write stuff like this, all you’re arguing is that you don’t want to listen to other people’s experiences and stories.