What is in Kelvin's Head?

Rainbow Laces

20/09/2013

Congratulations to Stonewall for their Rainbow Laces campaign – trying to persuade the various football organisations to make a gesture to indicate that they are supportive of their gay players. For such organisations, it is a gesture that won’t cost them much.

I’m pretty sure that for gay players themselves, all closeted at the moment, there will be a range of internal reactions. For some, there will be a huge sense that this is supportive. For others, I’m guessing that this may actually be personally be unwelcome because it shines a light too close to their own lives. For pro players must wonder whether if they come out they will lose sponsorship, support and opportunity. There is no legal protection to help you other than not being sacked from your team.

Of course, the chances are, that any player in such circumstances would do well. They would receive overwhelming support from anyone in front of a microphone. But what would it be like on the terraces?

I have enormous sympathy for what must go on in the mind of the player wondering whether to come out. It isn’t that different from my own world in the church.

I heard recently of a prominent member of the clergy choosing to talk about being gay for the first time in public recently at a well known Christian Arts festival. It is a big deal. For someone in that position they really can fear that jobs that they might have enjoyed doing would suddenly be blocked for them. There is no legal protection for such a person at all. They can even be sacked from the team.

In the football world there are said to be no professional football players who have come out. In the church it isn’t much better. No bishops have done so and even at the level of people running cathedrals in the UK, I think there are only two of us who are out (and one of us was initially outed in the press). Clearly, obviously, there are other people who are gay who do my job.

I’m not suggesting a rainbow cassock campaign nor even rainbow laces in the sanctuary – my views on footwear are clear. However, the time in drawing near when we ought to be calling for some small uncostly gestures from those in the church who are straight and who are in positions of power and influence.

I remember a number of years ago Bishop Idris making a supportive statement about his gay clergy during a Synod address. It meant a huge amount to a small number of people.

Church leaders need to think about how to make those gestures. For all Archbishop Justin Welby seems to have struck a welcome new tone recently, much like the pope, there is no change in policy.

I’d like to hear the likes of Justin Welby speaking positively about the gay clergy he has known and making it clear that senior gay clergy who do chose to come out will be supported and nourished and cherished. The fact that such talk is absent won’t strike many people. It strikes me every day.

It is the lack of such things which makes this area of the churches’ work so troubled. Those with some power and influence have the means to make a big difference by doing small things.

Rainbow laces won’t do the trick in the church but a few rainbow words would go a long way.

bishops coming out, LGBT. church, rainbow laces, Stonewall

7 responses to “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
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Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

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1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
  Reply