I don’t question Evangelicals’ earnestness, but I can’t share it when it comes to their responses to gay marriage and civil partnerships. I fall back on the line used by Rhett Butler to Scarlett O’Hara, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
Because, to be honest, I don’t. Practising gay couples may be wrong, they may even be bad, but the fact is I don’t give a damn what people do under their duvets. Call me a prude, but I don’t want to know what my married friends get up to either. They are friends, and we share a lot, but their bedroom is private, and I’m just not interested.
So, whatever the logic, I simply don’t find myself warming to Anglican Mainstream and its allies. They may be right but they seem obsessional. I thought much the same about ND and its worries over the Civil Partnership Bill: if gays want to play Mr-and-Mrs, well, let them. It doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, because frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
But I was brought up short by the Bishop of Winchester’s article last month, when he cast the net wider, and analysed the state we’re in – the huge social, political and moral revolution we are now caught up in, and the slowness and ignorance of any Anglican response to it. Horrifying stuff. Is a revolution really going on, and are we colluding with it by our wish to be nice, and our desire to be seen as tolerant?
If a senior and establishment bishop, member of the House of Lords, and author of so liberal a document as the 1999 Marriage in church after divorce, is writing in ND (of all places!) warning us of the coming destruction of our cherished and traditional values, something must be happening.
Are there really moral terrorists out to destroy our Christian civilization? It seems as though the Civil Partnership Act is like the orange alert; the Gender Recognition Act takes the warning level up to red; and whatever the Equality Bill comes up with will take us to black. The threat of destruction is imminent.
Richard Simons