Tuesday 7 February 2012

Playing catch-up

It's emerged this week that over 100 members of the CofE's clergy have written to the Church's General Synod calling for the clergy to be allowed to decide whether to offer civil partnership ceremonies on Church premises. This is welcome news from one point of view, but it also highlights fundamental inequalities in the way different Church thinking discriminates against people in this country. This is an explicit, legal inequality as well - the 2010 Equality Act(!) removed the previous prohibition on civil partnerships happening in places of worship, but made it clear that no church or religious group should be forced to hold civil partnerships if they don't want to.

While I would usually defend any move that prevents people from being forced to do things they don't want to, that cannot be the case where it's an open invitation to discrimination. We've already seen court cases where guest houses were prosecuted for refusing to take in gay couples as guests, for example - other laws explicitly forbid discrimination against people on the grounds of their sexuality, so why not this one?

In another example of what, to an atheist, are only slightly divergent threads of the same theology thinking and acting completely differently, this has led to the bizarre position whereby, for example, Quakers and some Liberal Jewish people can celebrate a civil partnership in their place of worship, but CofE members cannot. (There's also still the fundamental problem that civil partnerships are denied to straight couples, and that 'true' marriage (ie not a civil ceremony, a marriage in the real sense) is denied to gay couples, but that's another entry all of its own.)

The letter has not been made public but its existence shows that some members of the clergy are rather more in touch with modernity and the make-up of their flock than the General Synod, but that has its own problems - it could lead to further schism within the church, even more tangled and subtly divergent strands of religious thinking. But I hope the General Synod realises it's out of touch with the society it serves. Numbers of church attendees are falling dramatically, as I've said before, and they're only really holding up at all, certainly in larger cities, because of the increasing numbers of the flock being drawn from immigrant communities, rather than British people, who are (happily for me) becoming more and more secular. If the churches are serious about reversing the decline in attendances, they need to move with the times and treat everybody the same, so I hope the Synod pay heed to the contents of the letter.

I realise that allowing the clergy freedom of choice in this matter opens the door for differences in treatment of poeple across the country, depending on one's local clergyman's point of view, but that's got to be better than a blanket ban. At least people would have some chance of finding a church which would allow them their ceremony in a place of religious significance to them. They've moved to allow female vicars, they can move on this one, if they're serious about engaging with society as it is now, not as it was when they were all young clergymen themselves.

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