The Bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson, reported a couple of weeks ago on the reactions to his recent public statements.
See My Marriage Equality Postbag.
Read it all but I particularly liked this bit:
One lay comment sticks in my mind. The gentleman pointed out that a positive sense about homosexuality has been building in British society since the 1920’s. The resulting tsunami arrived in the 1990’s in the fields of education, culture media and sport, public life, the law, the military (in which he had been a senior officer), the police. In each of these areas of national life the overwhelming, when it came, was sudden and, surprisingly, almost entirely benign. The Church had parked itself in a siding in the 1990’s, and everyone else, as he put it, was somewhere round Birmingham by now.
The bishops, I was told, had simply taken the easiest way out — try to agree with everyone as much as possible, make generally safe noises about change, be nice to individual gay people whilst constructing fences against their full acceptance, humour reactionaries under a banner of inclusivity, generally treating past certainties as though they still applied as much as possible. As a military man he could say you cannot run any institution, least of all a Church, on niceness, evasion, pusillanimity, cowardice and hypocrisy. That’s one military view, anyway.
“about 80% have been supportive. These include some 20-30 deeply personal testimonies from gay couples, telling of love and faithfulness, sometimes against terrible odds over many years. Legal recognition will not make these relationships stronger, but it will de-stigmatise them.” – Bishop Alan Wilson – What was that in the gospels about “letting the oppressed go free”? This sounds like a very good outcome to me – that monogamously committed gay couples should be allowed to feel part and parcel of a socially well-adjusted community – at last! Bishop Alan may be provocative in his overt support for Gays, but… Read more »
This is also worth looking at in connection with Bishop Alan’s blog. There are sufficient examples of the homophobic being caught with their trousers down and other evidence to make this a very likley proposition.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/26/anti-gay-rhetoric-of-religious-leaders
I think what happened to break the dam in the USA quite recently was generational change, demographic change, and just the fact that so many gays and lesbians were out and demonstrably not flesh-eating zombies.
Also, it really helped that the defenders of pious homophobia in the USA almost to a person come off as so repulsive, both morally and aesthetically. They appear as either crazy frothing fanatics or as shameless hypocrites. The notorious Phelps tribe differ only by degree rather than in substance from all the others.
“Either Homosexuality is a phenomenon against nature, and defies Creation and/or evolution Or Homosexuality is a phenomenon within nature, and thus part of Creation and/or evolution Notoriously, perhaps, the vast majority of people in this country have moved since the 1920’s from the first position towards a more or less grudging conviction of the second. As the first position fades with the generations, simply asserting it louder is in fact driving change forward faster.” Indeed. And I have personally written to Fred Phelps thanking him for all of his work on behalf of gay liberation and to keep up the… Read more »
I must drop Fred a line too !