Last week, the Church Times carried an article by Colin Coward titled Most Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Anglicans live in the Global South. Another copy is here.
This week there is a letter to the editor challenging this article. The letter is from Canon Ben Enwuchola (who is described as “Chaplain to the Nigerian Community in England”) and Canon Chris Sugden. A copy appears here on the Anglican Mainstream site.
I suspect the contents of the letter are likely to be the subject of further challenges. There certainly seems to be increasing activity in the Global South.
The authors of the letter seem to be under the illusion that there are actually less people by orientation who are gay or lesbian in the so-called Global South. I would suggest that this is unlikely given that orientation itself is not culturally determined – but clearly a gay identity and the opportunity to be openly identified as gay is something much more likely in the West. Some of the misnomers – that ancient civilisations contained many ‘bisexual’ people suggests that the authors do not understand sexual orientation, and would probably prefer not to acknowledge its existence only the case… Read more »
Canon Ben Enwuchola says that moral theology suggests that an “is” cannot be equated with an “ought”. (So people should not act on their homosexual orientation) Actually the entire natural law tradition does make that equation. Natural law however has tended to think of “human nature” as a unitary and universal phenomenon. This debate is about destroying the unitary notion of human nature so that a range of people might be free to act according to their actual natures. As for some people’s psyches being distorted by the fall, Romans 1 would suggest that they are in fact distorted by… Read more »
Chris tyack wrote: “This debate is about destroying the unitary notion of human nature so that a range of people might be free to act according to their actual natures.” Dear Chris, you hit the mail on the head, almost. The issue is where you start when defining “nature”. If you start from human experiences / psyches (a la “I think therefore I am”) then you will conclude that same-sex sex is ok and support the case for full homosexual inclusion and acceptance. If you start from other facts, such as the biological function of sex, how men’s and women’s… Read more »
The high-handed claims that fewer or no LGBTQ people exist in nations and cultures which vilify and condemn them is transparently self-serving. The survey data about sexual orientation variances is typically most trustworthy when a large population is adequately sampled. No single sample gives us the final word, but trends across adequate samples can be provisionally taken to suggest the ballpark of our large population numbers. Further, we will still have confounding in the numbers to the extent that societies or cultures penalize LGBTQ citizens for speaking up honestly. So far, the trends are clear, even though we shall continue… Read more »
drdanfee wrote “We hardly ever nowadays would think that having sex in a temple innately harmonizes us with a god or goddess, or even necessarily with nature. Nowadays, we probably tend more to think that sexual states are basically human, not necessarily sympathetic religious possession by either a god or goddess or by a demon. It is easy to hear the fear and uneasiness beneath the ready orthodox denials: If we let them, our own LGBTQ people will suddenly speak up, on a scale that might embarrass all of us who have so long said we were the best, the… Read more »