Gay church blessings and a crisis of faith

by Damian Thompson Published: 7:00AM GMT 06 March 2010

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Labour counterpart Lord Alli due the legislative further to the Equality Bill Photo: UPPA

Eighty years ago a Scottish shepherd"s child won a place at St Andrew"s University. A connoisseur of Divinity, John Ebenezer Brown went on to turn a apportion in Kirkcaldy, Fife. He was majority desired by his group not slightest given he never let himself get angry. "I keep meditative of my father and how he never lifted his voice," pronounced the Prime Minister, in an talk with this journal a week ago.

Even so, one can"t assistance wondering how the Rev Mr Brown would have reacted if a happy integrate had asked him to concede their "wedding" to be achieved in his church and then, when he demurred, in jeopardy to take him to court. And how would he have felt, meaningful that this was function wholly as a outcome of the steely secularist bulletin of the supervision led by his own son?

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On Tuesday night, the House of Lords upheld an legislative further to the Equality Bill tabled by the happy Labour counterpart Lord Alli. As a result, the Bill right away removes the anathema on polite partnership ceremonies being hold in places of worship. If upheld in the stream form, the doors of churches will be thrown open to what are effectively happy weddings not as a outcome of a slight and sour perspective in a Church Synod, but by domestic fiat.

And if they exclude to comply? The front page of Thursday"s Daily spelled it out: "Vicars to be sued over happy weddings". And not usually vicars, but Catholic priests, rabbis, imams, ministers of the (gay-unfriendly) Church of Scientology to contend zero of soft-voiced ministers of the Kirk.

This was not a title the Government longed for to read, usually weeks prior to a ubiquitous election. Indeed, it seems as if the Cabinet had not been expecting, and didn"t welcome, Lord Alli"s amendment. Harriet Harman"s Equality Bill was already argumentative enough, but forcing stony-faced rectors to wed masculine couples.

Cue squeaks of be scared from Government sources. The Equality Minister "will confirm with Cabinet colleagues" either to concede Alli"s legislative further to mount when the Bill reaches the Commons subsequent week, we schooled yesterday. In the difference of a Labour MP who has championed the Bill: "Brown"s left rootless on this. And a small of us feel really let down that Harriet is caving in underneath pressure."

The complaint for the Government is that this Equality Bill was not ostensible to incite a showdown with the Churches or alternative religions. The legislation was presented as a "clarification" of the law, consolidating existent anti-discrimination regulations in to a singular Act. That should have been easy sufficient to trip past Church leaders, for whom taste is a mortal sin.

But not so fast. The Church of England is held up in a worldwide Anglican polite quarrel over homosexuality. Britain"s fastest-growing congregations, both inside and outward the C of E, are evangelical: they courtesy the total judgment of happy weddings as sincerely sinful. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is secretly supportive to homosexuals who wish to get marred, but brave not contend so in public. His associate bishops are all over the place on the theme but they determine on one thing: they don"t wish to be pushed by the Government in to happy church blessings.

Until last month, they were in a identical meal about an legislative further to the Equality Bill that was tabled by Harriet Harman. It reminded Churches that, given 2003, they have no longer had the right to exclude practice to atheists or homosexuals requesting for lay positions. Anglican bishops managed to better this legislative further in the Lords, but there was small disbelief that Harman would reintroduce it that is, until Pope Benedict XVI, no less, intervened. Speaking to English and Welsh bishops in Rome, he described the pieces of the Equality Bill as "as attack on healthy law", that imposed "unjust stipulations on the leisure of eremite communities to action in suitability with their beliefs."

On Feb 2, when the Pope"s residence was done public, Harriet Harman stood her ground. The subsequent day, however, she forsaken her plan to reintroduce the legislative further forcing Churches to imitate with physical practice law. The Government had been ready to omit the hand-wringing of bishops in the Lords, but had lost the haughtiness after a monster ticking-off from "a bloke in a dress", as one Labour MP described the Pope.

So right away we have dual climbdowns in a row: one over contracting gays and atheists, and if Harman"s renunciation of Alli"s legislative further is taken severely the alternative over homosexual "weddings" in churches. On the face of it, then, the Churches and their regressive eremite allies, such as Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, are winning their quarrel with Downing Street.

But the being is utterly different. These small victories problematic the bigger picture. The singular underline of Gordon Brown"s supervision is not the mercantile incompetence. Rather, it is enthusiast secularism. For the initial time in British history, no one sitting around the Cabinet list binds normal Christian views that challenge the magnanimous accord on amicable issues or passionate morality. In May 2008, the Catholic Cabinet members Ruth Kelly, Des Browne and Paul Murphy voted for a pointy cut in the top termination extent to twelve weeks. All 3 have given left or been pushed out of government.

As a result, righteous Catholic Labour MPs of Irish skirmish represented, despite ingloriously, by the former Speaker Michael Martin no longer strive any shift on the Government. The same goes for Labour Nonconformism. Jim Callaghan favourite to allude to the old observant that there was some-more Methodism than Marxism in the Labour Party. Now they have both gone, transposed by an beliefs of human rights secure in European secularism.

Just as Britain transient revolution, so it never succumbed to French- or Italian-style anticlericalism. In the early years, conjunction did the Common Market, that was founded by Catholics. But the mood in both Brussels and Strasbourg (home of the European Court of Human Rights) has changed neatly opposite Christianity interjection in piece to the Catholic Church"s own unlucky sex scandals, And that shift easily matches the anti-religious prejudices of Harriet Harman, Ed Balls and Alan Johnson, to name 3 of the majority peremptory unbelievers in the Cabinet.

Also, secularist politicians have a tip weapon, that they are clever not to advertise: majority of the leaders and majority of the bureaucracy of the Anglican and Catholic Churches in Britain are rooting for Labour in the enlightenment wars.

The Catholic Education Service, for example, has rolled over in the face of a sex preparation Bill that will force all state initial schools to learn pupils about passionate intercourse. Meanwhile, Ed Balls insists that Catholic schools yield report about where to "access" abortion. And what was the reply from the Catholic authorities and their Left-leaning advisers? Silence, assumingly in lapse for an legislative further to the Bill that allows conviction schools to learn their own doctrines in further to mandatory recommendation on condoms and abortion. The legislative further is worthless. "We"ve been sole a pup," says a heading Catholic peer.

It stays to be seen how majority assertive legislation Labour can pull by prior to the election. The odds of a shift of government, joined with the actuality that this administration department has assumingly climbed down on a integrate of supportive issues, has swayed a small regressive Christians that they can redeem ground. But prior to they repose as well majority goal in the Tories, maybe they should review theblog post that Lord Tebbit filed yesterday morning.

In it, Tebbit described how he and Lord Waddington fought opposite Lord Alli"s "gay wedding" legislative further in the House of Lords on Tuesday. "The outcome was a subjection rather than a better for us," he wrote. "We lost by 95 to 23. Neither the Government nor the Conservative central orator who had both argued opposite the legislative further voted with us. That does not raise the repute of politicians."

Maybe not; but it does indicate that we are relocating towards a elemental shift in the attribute in in between politicians and Britain"s enfeebled Churches. Although Labour might not wish to pull the means of happy weddings this side of the election, it exuberantly embraces the element that eremite teachings with amicable implications contingency be subordinated to domestic definitions of equality. Do the Tories think the same way? That might rely on who is sitting on David Cameron"s lounge when he has to have up his mind on a ethereal issue. Conservative sources contend he has already come inside of a hair of rigourously endorsing happy marriage.

But it is not the Conservatives who instituted this ancestral change, subsequent to that arguments about disestablishment appear similar to a sideshow. It was Britain"s initial post-Christian government, presided over by Gordon Brown, a man whose ideological allies not usually secrete disregard for the Church but additionally know how to try by artful means to get open perspective and European legislation to accelerate the decline. And so a thousand-year stipulate in in between supervision and eremite believers starts to tumble in on itself similar to the roof tiles of a surplus church.