LGBT Archives - Page 10 of 85 - What is in Kelvin's Head?

So far as I can tell, most Christians believe that right at the centre of the public square there grows a tall tree called Christians Ethics. And Christians think that they sit up in its gentle branches presiding over the moral dilemmas of this world greatly blessed by what the good Lord has given unto them.

Christians tend to think that they hold a privileged position when it comes to moral decision making.

And Christians are wrong.

And this isn’t just limited to Christians either. It applies to other faith groups and even to non-believers, who sometimes seem to presume that the Tree of Atheist Goodness is nudging just a little higher than everyone else’s tree and that this means that the privileges of Being In Charge of morality should naturally cross over to them.

They are wrong too. And mostly for the same reasons.

Ten years ago I was a candidate in a General Election for the Liberal Democrats at a time when being a Lib Dem was both more popular and more respectable than it is today. (I’m no longer a member of the party as it happens, and didn’t vote Lib Dem at the last election).

When you are a candidate in an election, you have to be prepared for people asking you questions before they cast their vote. For a relatively small number of people will chose how to vote directly on the basis of their interaction with candidates over questions which they care about. You have to be ready with an answer about taxation, abortion, nuclear weapons and so on. Political parties tend to help out with answering these questions – when you sign up for a party ticket you sign up to represent a particular manifesto of positions after all. However, manifestos don’t cover everything and in any case, some people want to interact with a candidate directly.

The most difficult question that I had when I was a candidate came from a couple who were obviously thinking very deeply about how they would cast their vote. Their question was along these lines: “We are disposed to vote for a liberal candidate but we hesitate to vote for you because we know from your profession that you are a Christian. To be honest we are worried about the values that you hold and we presume that your values are not our values. We don’t think Christian values are particularly nice values. Can you reassure us that if elected you will conduct yourself as a Liberal rather than according to a Christian agenda?”

It was a great question and made me think a lot. I did engage with the couple and in the end they told me that they did indeed intend to vote for me.

I was lucky in being able to talk to them about the issues they were concerned about and put my own position over which in the end was not that different from their own. There was no alternative but to go through things issue by issue. As it happened, being able to talk at first hand about being a gay member of the clergy did give them some reassurance.

But the point is, they had come to the view that Christians have a considerably more unpleasant ethical position than decent people in society.

And I fear that this is increasingly the case and that most Christians neither believe that others hold this view nor care about it either. After all, they are still up in their tree.

Today there is a new interview with Tim Farron that has been published and it bears some reflection. Tim is likely to be elected as the Leader of the Liberal Democrats over the next couple of weeks. It is a car crash of an interview and heralds the fact that the decimation of the liberal cause in British political life is not yet complete. Its likely new leader seems intent on finishing off a liberal tradition that is already gasping for breath.

First we’ve the headline: “Maybe God’s plan is for me to lose a bunch of elections and be humbled”

Then we’ve the content which shows that the headline is lifted out of a quote of jaw-dropping stupidity both politically and theologically.

Farron believes that everyone will go to either heaven or hell. “I think the Bible is clear. Everybody has something coming after.” As a non-believer, will I go to hell? “Well, it’s not for me to make that judgement. It’s a real cop-out, this one, but Abraham says: ‘Will not the judge of all things do right?’ And at the end, no one will disagree with the justice of what God has done.”

I ask if he consulted God when considering whether to stand for the party leadership. “Of course you do, of course you do. Obviously you ask for His guidance.” Does he think God has a plan for him? “I think He has a plan for everybody.” I’m not sure what that means. “Well, God is sovereign. Dreadful things happen in this world, but that reminds us that we need a saviour. I don’t go round fixating that God has some major plan for me. Maybe his plan is for me to lose a bunch of elections and be humbled. God’s plan could be that some pretty brutal things happen to you. But the one thing I fall back on is that God’s overall plan is good.”

One wonders where to begin. It seems to me that what we’ve got from Tim Farron here is bad politics and even worse theology.

Let us presume for a moment that God is in the business of direct meddling in human politics. (I don’t think that God is in that business, but let us presume that it is true). Might we not think that God in her wisdom might have more on her mind than whether Tim Farron or someone else leads a political party which is likely to be locked out of power for years? We might also draw breath at the idea that if God wants Farron to lose a bunch of elections and be humbled then “God’s plan” might be for the Tories to be in power. Is someone really as capable of giving such a crass quote to the newspapers really going to lead a political party in the UK?

Incidentally, the “Will not the judge of all things do right?” quote comes from Genesis Chapter 18 and Tim Farron seems to have been reading the Living Bible paraphrase. What you need to know is this – it comes straight out of the Sodom and Gomorrah story. It is interesting that given the controversy surrounding Tim Farron’s voting record on gay rights that he lifts a quote from scripture right out of that particular ancient saga. It is also interesting that he chooses a portion of scripture where many liberals reading it might well say that the human being (Abraham) in the story had a more secure grasp of justice, righteousness, compassion and fairness than the God depicted there, who is indeed said to rain down arbitrary terror upon people.

A lot of the trouble here comes from the idea that God has an overall plan. Tim Farron believes it but I don’t – or at least not in that way. If God has a plan then it is not unreasonable to ask why God is hanging about and not implementing it more quickly than God does. Providence gives us a God to blame for the way things are rather than giving us a prompt to take responsibility as autonomous subjects both for being honest about our past and in driving the future forward towards justice.

I tend to believe much more in vocation than in providence. I’d be happy to hear from any political leader about how their religious views (Christian, Muslim Buddhist, Atheist or whatever) give them a drive to bring about a better world. I believe in people being in touch with an inner calling to put the world to rights.

However, I’m very suspicious of people believing God to be on their side and believing that they are in the business of implementing God’s plan for the world.

Tim Farron seems to me to be unfit to lead the Liberal Democrat party and I say that as one of the very few who predicted the near wipe-out of Liberal Democrat seats that took place at the General Election.

I’ve been troubled by the attitude of Lib Dem friends to his voting record on LGBT issues. Farron famously voted in favour of giving registrars the “right” to opt out of dealing with gay couples. This has been dismissed as a side issue by Tim’s supporters. The trouble is, these are not side issues, these are my rights.

The election of Tim Farron will show that the party has learned nothing at all from the Tuition Fees debacle. At the time of that disaster, the party chose pragmatism over party policy. Choosing cheeky-chappy Tim Farron as leader because he has a good record in winning elections despite the fact that he has an illiberal voting record on key touchstone issues seems to me to be remarkably similar.

The trouble is, choosing good policy over pragmatism is exactly what liberalism actually is.

I’ll be heading off to join in with Pride Scotia this weekend. It is the Pride march that takes place in Edinburgh.

Whilst looking for some pics of Pride to illustrate the facebook event invitation for Episcopalians at Pride, I came upon this picture.

It is a picture of me standing in the rain addressing the Pride Scotia crowd. I remember how wet I was and I remember very clearly what I was saying. I’d been invited to speak about the idea of campaigning in favour of equal marriage though in fact at the time, we didn’t use the term equal marriage.

In the course of my speech, I said something like this:

The passing of the hate crimes legislation is a huge milestone. It is great news.

But what I want to say today is that we want more.

The hate crimes legislation means that people will be dealt with more severely if their crimes are motivated by homophobia. That will make Scotland safer for us all. It is great news. But it isn’t enough yet. We must not rest until every street in Scotland is safe for every member of our community. We will not have achieved what we want until every street is a safe place. And we need every workplace to be a safe place for gay people. And we need every school to be a safe place for gay kids and gay teachers. And we need every church and faith community to be a safe place for gay people too. Those are the things that we need to make homophobia unthinkable.

This afternoon, the LGBT Network and the Equality network are urging people to sign a petition to the Scottish Parliament to change the law even more. Before you go today, make sure you sign the petition calling on the Scottish Parliament to allow gay and lesbian couples to get married. It is one of the next steps we are campaigning for.

I want every gay couple to be able to walk down the street holding hands if they want to do so.

And I want every gay couple to be able to walk down the aisle holding hands if they want to too.

We can make that happen. We can get our parliamentarians to change the law.

When you go past the parliament today, make as much noise as you can. Whistle and yell and cheer for all that has been accomplished in making Scotland a better place for LGBT people. And whistle and yell and shout for more. It is time to say, Separate is not Equal. Our relationships are as passionate and loving as anyone else’s. We have the same potential for commitment as anyone else does. We deserve the same rights as anyone else has.

There are two things which strike me today as I think back to that speech.

Firstly it is the memory of people heckling. Secondly it is the date on which that photograph was taken.

Those few of us who were campaigning for equal marriage in those days didn’t really have a clue whether the people who might benefit from the change in the law that we hoped for would actually back us. No-one knew.

As I stood on top of that bus, there were some people in the crowd making mischief and heckling. (Not that I always mind a good-natured but slightly grumpy crowd – in some ways that is my natural habitat). But the thing I realised as I shouted away into an inadequate loudspeaker system was that most people were not making fun at all. Most people were thinking about it. Most people who heard me speak that day had not really given the idea much thought and it was clear that people were making up their minds.

As I often have to remind people, I used to be against the change that I’ve argued for. As someone who was once an evangelical Christian I had once been against the idea of gay people coupling up at all. Then after coming out myself I thought that gay people simply didn’t need marriage and might be better to be free from the conventions and expectations of marriage. On both counts I was wrong and I only found that out by listening to the expectations and hopes of gay couples who were celebrating their relationships alongside listening to the expectations and hopes of straight couples planning weddings and realising that they were pretty much the same. And the point is, if I can change my mind, anyone can change their mind. One of the reasons that gay equality is taking a long time to achieve in churches is that many leaders simply cut themselves off from providing pastoral care to gay members of their flocks and didn’t hear their stories. Such cruel and ignorant behaviour has diminished the ability of the churches to proclaim God’s love in the UK and in other countries. The churches’ proclamation of the great message of Love has been harmed and diminished in the process.

What I saw the day I spoke at Pride Scotia was that though some people were not interested, the bulk of the crowd were very interested. They believed their loves were as good as anyone else’s loves. In theological terms, I realised that I believed they were as blessed as anyone else.

I went to Pride that day trying to change the minds of the marchers as much as changing the mind of anyone else.

I’d become fed up with the lack of progress in the church over gay rights. Rather than battling on it seemed right to put my energies into bringing about change in society rather than just turning people off from the message of justice and joy that I was hoping they would receive.

I rather think that was a good call.

It is obvious to me this year that we are getting there. Oh, I still want all streets to be safe and all churches to be safe for LGBT folk. We’re still a long way off achieving either of those aims but we are much further along the road than we were.

I was proud of my church last week – at every stage of a long, tortuously complex decision-making process, we voted by convincing majorities in favour of equality.

But the real shocker is not to think about how much has changed since the photograph above was taken. It is to think about its date. It was taken only in 2009 – just six years ago.

My world has changed in those six years. Every gay person in the UK has seen the world change before their eyes in those six years.

My ambition is neither satisfied nor static. I don’t just want gay couples to be safe walking down the Royal Mile – I want such couples to be safe walking down the street in Kampala. I want gay couples to be safe in Lagos as much as I want them to be safe in Linlithgow or Livingston.

But I’m proud of what we’ve achieved.

And by me, I don’t just mean the usual suspects. I don’t just mean the few souls who believed marriage had to changed before they could imagine how to get that change to happen. And I certainly don’t just mean the LGBT folk who can now benefit from the change in the law.

I mean everyone straight, gay, powerful or apparently powerless who helped make change come about.

And I ask everyone who has been a part of this to ask just one question as I set off to Pride this year…

If we can do that in six years – what shall we do next?

Providence and Vocation for Liberals in Public Life

Proud Christian

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