There have been several reports following up on the conference last Saturday.
Ekklesia was first onto the web with Religious and non-religious unite to combat homophobia and transphobia by Savi Hensman.
Telegraph Matthew Moore Law ‘will force churches to employ gay staff’.
The Christian Institute has Equality chief ‘regrets’ appointing evangelical as well as Government to force gay
youth workers on church.
Pink News has Trevor Phillips acknowledges ‘intense hurt’ caused by Evangelical appointment and Churches to be banned from turning down gay staff.
The Church Times has a report Equality exemption ‘narrow’, written by me. See text below the fold.
A GOVERNMENT MINISTER has confirmed that the new definition of the “purposes of organised religion” published in the Equality Bill is intended to restore the scope of the exemption to “what it was supposed to have been in the first place”.
Speaking at a conference in London on Saturday, Maria Eagle, Under-Secretary of State in the Government Equalities Office, said that, apart from a few key issues such as whether to have women clergy, churches could not claim to be outside the scope of discrimination law.
Responding to a question about the Church’s intention to support amendments “to restore the status quo” (News, 15 May), Ms Eagle said that in recent years the existing exemptions had been “over-interpreted”. The intention was to make clear now that this exemption was “as narrow as it possibly can be”.
Another speaker at the conference on “Faith, Homophobia, Transphobia and Human Rights” was Trevor Phillips, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission. He spoke candidly about the controversy caused by the choice of the Revd Joel Edwards, formerly general director of the Evangelical Alliance, as a member of the commission. The TUC Annual Congress had unanimously called for Mr Edwards to be removed last year.
Mr Phillips said that he had failed both to “understand what the Evangelical Alliance represents” and “to anticipate the intense hurt” that the appointment had caused within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transexual (LGBT) community. He hoped that the commission would be judged on the basis of what it was able to deliver, and he promised that in relation to the LGBT strand there would be significant improvements soon.
Other speakers included the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Canon Marilyn McCord Adams, and Canon Giles Fraser. Both called for the Church of England to withdraw its claims for exemption from equal-opportunity laws. Canon Fraser saw no difference between these claims and the homophobia of the football terraces. Professor McCord Adams identified their origins in the “systemic evils” of idolatrous civic and fertility religion.
According to the Christian Institute spokesman in the Telegraph: “Christians are sick to the back teeth of equality and diversity laws…”
I’m “sick to the back teeth” of “Christian spokesmen” making such ridiculous statements.
As a Christian, I welcome equality and diversity laws, and see them as a great opportunity for us to practice what we should have been preaching for centuries, the essential dignity and respect due to each child of God.
If it were down to people like the Christian Institute we would, no doubt, still have Section 28 and all the rest of what was really discriminatory and oppressive legislation from the 80s and 90s. I am SO heartened to listen to the speeches from last weekend’s conference. I hope the legislation is passed with a minimal get-out clause for religious organisations. Hurrah for the dignity that equality and diversity offers to all people!
What is ironic is that this government actually think they have any moral authority to tell the church how it should behave
I too am a Christian. I too deplore homophobia and all forms of sexual and gender discrimination. It is time that some Christians recognised the sincere views of other equally committed Christians. Una
Either we ALL have Equality, whether we are right or wrong, good or bad, nice or nasty, or it has just become an empty word, a mantra disguising political bias.
As with how it has allowed varying rules for tax free expenses and allowances according to who you are, I suspect that what this Government means by Equality has a lot more to do with favouring people you like, and disfavouring people you don’t, than providing equality, and maximising freedom, for ALL.
“What is ironic is that this government actually think they have any moral authority to tell the church how it should behave – Posted by: thomasl”
To paraphrase Churchill, “this government” is the institution with the least amount of moral authority . . . except for “the church” (most of it).
Lord have mercy!
“Mr Phillips is reported to have answered that had he known at the time of the appointment what he knew now, how deeply people had been hurt and alienated over this.” What annoys me about this is that Mr. Edwards, or his fellow Evangelicals, are far more likely to see this comment as yet another example of persecution of “Christians”, and it will not enter their heads to ask the simple question “If I am truly following the Gospel, how could I cause hurt to anyone?” If any conservatives on this board answer, I expect justifications about how “standing for… Read more »
Amen Fr Mark Matthew 7:12 “Do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets”. Luke 6:31-36 “Do to others as you would have them do to you. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them… But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.… Read more »
Yes, Mark, and Cheryl, I do agree, but today’s interpretation of Matthew 7:12 seems to be rather:
“Do unto others before they do it unto you”, which speaks of proactive retribution rather than the charity of Christ.
Fact is, society and government in UK are changing far faster than church life institutions can pace. As sea changes go, this one has swept through in record time, speeded up greatly by new science and globalization. Even calls by church figures to respect gay folks’ human rights can be heard as vexed with all the customary negatives about gay people, hanging in our fouled up collective global air spaces. Decode? I will preach nasty stuff about gays, but God will bash them in eternity, not me. As change messages go, this is contradictory, implies a whole host of dubious… Read more »
The position should be quite simple. If the church wishes to be allowed to do exactly as it pleases, then it should not accept anything from the state or expect to be anything other than just another pressure group rather than enjoying a privileged position.
And all should be subject to the civil law. Personally, I think there should be no exemptions at all, and if the church doesn’t like that, it can always close down entirely. I am sure the effects of that would be ultimately beneficial.
“If the church wishes to be allowed to do exactly as it pleases, then it should not accept anything from the state or expect to be anything other than just another pressure group rather than enjoying a privileged position.” I heartily agree, unreservedly. This is how is should be, how it should always have been. Why do I get the impression that for you this state of affairs would be a well deserved punishment for the Church? For me, the current state of affairs is the punishment, and the situation you describe would be a welcome relief. But maybe that’s… Read more »
Giles Fraser’s suggestion that Christian opposition to homosexual equality is no better than homophobic terrace chanting…sounds more like a throwaway remark than an analysis. So I’ll try to provide a more accurate picture. -(1) Inequality is something that Christians fight daily: e.g., the supposed and baseless inequality between unborn and born. -(2) There is no chance of citing any tempted/untempted or sinner/virtuous inequality, since all of us are tempted and all are sinners. -(3) Likewise all of us are *equally* responsible for minimising, rather than glorying in, our sin and its results. -(4) There is, however, always bound to be… Read more »
“No ‘protection’ needed in intercourse by monogamously married couples in numerous cultures, yet it is advertised as being necessary for pretty much all homosexuals.” This is absolutely untrue. Monogamous gay couples have no more need of safe sex than monogamous heterosexual couples. Seriously, Christopher, if you really want to appear scientific, rational, and objective, get your facts straight. They only reason anyone would advise a monogamous gay couple to practice safe sex is if there is the likelihood of infidelity, or if one partner had brought a chronic sexually transimtted disease into the relationship, and that advice would be just… Read more »
Re homophobia, you would be quite right to argue against opposition to homosexuality merely on the basis of a text (although it would be wven more wrong not to take account of the text and aim to understand what it is saying before coming to any overall conclusion). ‘Homosexuality is sinful because the Bible says so’ is an inadequate view in and of itself, besides being something I would never say. That, of course, does not make the first part of the statement true or false: it’s merely a matter of the ‘because’ being a non-sequitur. The other points I’ve… Read more »
“besides being something I would never say.” Indeed. But you still start from your own personal biases and then look for evidence, however unreliable, to back them up. You even misrepresent the facts, like your statement above about safe sex and monogamous gay couples. You use this piece of misinformation to bolster your underlying belief that there is something intrinsically wrong with gay people: “The whole idea of protection must ring alarm bells on the naturalness front.” How is this so? Since non-monagamous straight couples have the same need for safe sexual practices as non-monogamous gay ones, and since monogamous… Read more »