ENGLAND: Church of England Bishops vote for gay 'marriage'

by Andrew Carey
Church of England Newspaper

26/11/04

Eight Bishops voted last week for the government’s civil partnership bill, which critics claim amounts to the legalisation of gay ‘marriage’.

The Bill will now pass into the law with the support of the majority of the Bishops of the Church of England who were present at the debate in the House of Lords against the will of only two bishops, Chester and Southwell.

After the debate the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement claimed that an increasing number of bishops were turning a blind eye to the blessing of same sex partnerships in church ceremonies. Martin Reynolds of the group said that the Movement were increasing their print run of liturgies for same sex unions in expectation at an increased demand next year when civil partnerships become legal. The Church of England official spokesman said that clergy were free “to pray for anyone in a private and pastoral situation”.

Attempts were led by Baroness O’Cathain to extend the provision of the Bill to include siblings living together and carers, who she said also suffered from the injustice that the Bill sought to put right. But her amendments failed.

The Bishop of Chelmsford, John Gladwin, defended the ‘clarity’ of the Bill. “The clarity of principle of this Bill is that it deals with relationships between people of the same sex. That is the central principle of it. It is different from marriage but it has this parallel.

One of the reasons people in my office and the clergy encrouage people who are lv iing together to enter into marriage, recognising that marriage is a relationship between the two of them and not just a statement in the law, is in order that the community as a whole should be clear about the relationship that they are in. The bill achieves that for people of long term relationships of the same sex. It is not just about gay couples, it is about people of the same sex,” he declared.

But the Bishop of Chester said his difficulty with the Bill was that the partnerships closely “parallel marriage” pointing to the “real danger of a de facto introduction of same sex marriage by that process.”

He said: “The hsitory of social legislation in this country is often that the consequences are not quite those that are stated as intended.” He pointed to divorce and abortion as examples of this. He called on the government to offer reasurances that the type of relationships which weren’t covered by a civil partnership bill would be addressed.

Lord Tebbit, the former government minister cited his own personal experience of nearly losing his life and his wife to an IRA bomb. “Had the IRA been a little more successful and had I died, I have no doubt whatsoever that one of my children would have put aside their life and career to care for my wife. Under the law as it is and under the law as the govenrment intend to leave it therewould be no opion, when my wife died, but for that child of ours to be forced out of the family home by the need to sell it in order to pay inheritance tax.”

He argued that while everyone recognised that there was injustice, Parliament was not in favour of removing the injustice by amending the Bill. “The debate we are now having centres not on society’s regard for those who enter into the sacred contract of marriage as opposed to those who form a civil partnership; rather, the debate we are having is about money, and nothing else.”

The Bishops who voted in favour of civil partnerships were the Bishops of Chelmsford, Manchester, Norwich, Oxford, Peterborough, St Albans, St Edmundsbury and Ipswich and Truro.

END