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Ask! Tell!

20 September 2011 By 7 Comments

Today shall not pass on this blog without noting the change in the law that now allows gay people to service openly in the military in the USA. The so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule that has now been consigned to history was an emblematic piece of hypocrisy. The idea was that it was OK to happen to be gay in the US military, but it wasn’t OK to be honest and open about that. It was an uncomfortable half-way house on the road to acceptance. On the one hand the policy prevented the military authorities from harassing closeted gay military personnel but on the other it meant that people faced direct discrimination if they did disclose their sexuality.

Over 13000 people were discharged from the US military because they were either caught out or chose to be open. That is a lot of people’s lives messed up, a lot of money spent on training people who were then deemed unsuitable and a lot of grief all round.

All over now. Cause indeed for rejoicing.

So why is it significant for me to mark on this blog?

Well, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is similar (though not identical) to the situation for many gay clergy. To be blunt, you get rewarded for staying in the closet. Come out and you don’t know what will happen to you. Come out and you could be removed from your post by your bishop. Or the next bishop who comes along. Or the Vestry might make life impossible because there are no established guidelines to stop them. Come out about your relationship and you don’t know where you are in the morass of ethics and values regarding who you can live with and what are the rules.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell comes very close to the attitude that the Anglican Churches have in the UK towards gay people becoming bishops. It doesn’t affect that many people directly, but it sends out a ghastly message indirectly to the many. Moderate Christians supportive of gay clergy think that policy stinks. Those in the church most opposed to gay clergy think it stinks. Friends in the USA and Canada, punished collectively in their churches because they affirmed one ministry or another connected to people who happen to be gay, think it stinks. The angry leaders of African provinces looking back at Britain think it stinks.

We can’t just blame Rowan William’s depressing tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury. That is too easy. Notwithstanding that though, I’d say that the closeted straight supporters of gay clergy have a particular role to play in finding a way out of the mire.

Ask! Tell! Whoever you are.

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Scottish Government Consultation

2 September 2011 By Leave a Comment

Just to note with rejoicing that the Scottish Government has published its initial consultation on changes that are proposed to marriage law and civil partnership law in Scotland.

I’m sorry that the consultation makes repeated use of the phrase “same-sex marriage”. What I’m hoping for is opening marriage to same-sex couples. We need there to be one institution that is equally open to straight couples and gay couples.

Fortunately, the consultation does ask for comments on changes to the law that would achieve that. There are some proposals in it that would not achieve that, so careful responses are necessary.

The document is available here.

I now find myself wondering whether there needs to be some information meetings organised to help people to make informed responses.

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Who is welcome?

27 August 2011 By 12 Comments

I want to pick up again on a comment that has been left by Helen on a previous post. She said:

Is it necessary to explain who you welcome? Should a church not welcome all? If you list welcoming gay people then you would need to list disabled, addicts, people of other ethnic backgrounds……..etc all who feel alienated towards christianity often. Is all not enough? St mary’s feels currently a place of welcome to all.

I think it is worth carrying on this discussion and those questions are worth answering.

My initial response is that lots of institutions are quite good at saying that they welcome everyone. However, that isn’t the same as actually making changes which will actually make everyone feel welcome.

There is a difference between gay people and the groups that Helen identifies – this is that some parts of the church actively, loudly and belligerently campaign against the human rights and well-being of gay people. Even though churches may not have a great heritage in some of these other areas, I don’t think that there is any similar campaign against disabled people, addicts or people of non-white ethnic groups. It is quite different and I often feel puzzled that straight people can’t see the difference.

That isn’t to say that there are not issues to think about for all those groups though. Just looking at the list that Helen thought of, I think it is worth making the following comments.

Regarding disability issues, I think that rather than say, “The Disabled Are Welcome at Our Services” it is probably actually more welcoming to make clear statements about accessibility and to continue to try to eliminate both physical and non-physical barriers to participation. Our current access situation is available here, though it does change from time to time. It used to be the case that disability was an impediment to ordination. It isn’t that long ago, for example that an attempt was made to bar someone I knew who had a history of epilepsy from priesthood in our church. Things have changed considerably in these areas though now, thank God.

With regards to addicts, I think that the situation is mixed. Churches are not always terrible places for people with addictions. Some indeed make space available for 12- step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous etc. However, some care does need to be taken with how one speaks of such groups – as they are anonymous, they often don’t want it to be advertised that they are meeting, preferring to go under names like, “The Thursday Group” or something like that. I don’t know whether people who live with addictions are more or less alienated from church life than from other institutions in society, but I’d be interested to know whether there has been any research on this.

With regards to people of different ethnic backgrounds, there are certainly things to do. I often speak of us being an internationally gathered congregation and have made particular efforts to make sure that different ethnicities are visually pictured on the cathedral website. So, although the student group pic has lots of white hands on it, this marriage one has African hands and the children’s ministry page has Asian hands all covered with sticky paint. Again, I expect that these ways of representing the common life of a congregation are as important as any statements about who may or may not be welcome.

Incidentally, coming to St Mary’s has disabused me of any prejudice that a congregation which is explicit about its welcome to gay folk might find it difficult to welcome African folk and particularly Anglicans from Nigeria. We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord.

There are other groups who might traditionally feel unwelcome in church. Two come to mind particularly – those who are single and those who are divorced.

One of our statements about ourselves here at St Mary’s says this in response to some of these issues:

We are young, we are old. We are straight, we are gay. Some are single, some are married, some are partnered, some are single again. We are men and we are women. Some live alone, some live with others. We have different abilities. We have different understandings of the truth. We have all kinds of different reasons for choosing to make this our spiritual home.

I enjoy leading a church which is happy to make such statements about itself out loud and post them explicitly for all to see.

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Friendly and Welcoming Churches in Edinburgh

23 August 2011 By 4 Comments

Time for a quick round-up of churches which welcome and affirm gay folk over in Edinburgh. I made a plea for information last week which was forthcoming, so it is only fair to list the results.

  • Old St Paul’s has a statement on the page of its XYmonday group which says it is “inclusive group welcoming everyone regardless of gender, sexuality (+ all the usual stuff) and despite the strong church link, we are open to people of all faiths and none; we’re here to forge friendship and conversation – not to try and convert people. “
  • St Michael and all Saints has a statement on its liturgy page which says: “We are a welcoming and inclusive congregation. Jesus in the gospels responded to those who came to Him regardless of gender, sexuality, colour or class. We seek to follow Our Lord Jesus Christ in welcoming all those who seek to encounter God in our worship and through our tradition.”
  • The Rector of St James’s Leith said to me on Facebook “Let me be explicit about this: St James Leith welcomes LGBT people. We also try to be welcoming (of all) , but being human, aren’t always as good at it as we’d like to be.”
  • And St Columba’s by the Castle wins a prize for saying on its liturgy leaflet each week: “We believe God affirms all regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, background or ethnicity and we welcome any who wish to worship and share Communion with us. We welcome and support LGBT people, affirm their lives and ministries, and celebrate their relationships.”

I don’t know of any others to list. P’s and G’s used to have quite a good gay group at one time and was a place 15 years ago or so where I knew several gay people who said that they had found it an affirming place for them. I’ve a feeling that may have changed, but if anyone knows otherwise, do let me know.

I remember a while ago hearing people say, “Oh, we don’t want to say we are welcoming to lgbt people or else people will think we are a gay church, we’ll just say we’re welcoming to everyone”. That, of course is an example of people underestimating the alienation which so many LGBT folk feel towards Christianity. It is also a good example of real life ecclesiological homophobia. (If you’re actions are limited by fear of being thought gay, you are staring homophobia right in the face and in danger of perpetuating it).

There is still time for more nominations. In the mean time, whoever you are and whatever your sexuality, if you are looking for a church in Edinburgh, those four congregations listed above might be good places to start looking.

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Are there any gay friendly Episcopal churches in Edinburgh?

19 August 2011 By 21 Comments

Someone said something to me earlier this week which quite shocked me. They said there was no Episcopal congregation in Edinburgh which was welcoming to LGBT people.

By this, they did not mean that there was an absence of any Episcopal congregations with happy gay people in them. That is clearly not so. The question is, is there any such church which says publicly either by saying so on its website or its literature that LGBT people are welcome or which runs an LGBT group or equivalent which it advertises?

Before we all get ourselves in a tiz saying, “Oh, my church welcomes everyone, we say we welcome everyone therefore we must by definition welcome gay people…” just think it through. You don’t have to spend very long in the company of any group of gay people before you hear someone express the view that they’ve been negatively treated by some church or religious body or another. Also, though churches say that everyone is welcomed, it doesn’t stop them welcoming people explicitly who are for example, students, men, children, fabulous sopranos etc. Saying you welcome everyone is wonderful and I’m sure that lots do. Actually saying you welcome LGBT folk is quite another thing and appears to be considerably more rare.

Anyone want to make nominations.

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Attitudes

15 August 2011 By 2 Comments

Now, there has been some real news worth noting in the week that is passed. The new Scottish Social Attitudes survey has been published. It is a huge survey of what people in Scotland think about a number of different things. The value of this research is that they keep asking the same questions over different surveys for a number of years. Thus you get an incredibly useful snapshot of what the people think which can be compared over time.

This year’s survey has just been published and the big headline news is the massive shift in attitudes towards gay people that are demonstrated by the survey.

This year’s survey shows that support for gay people is much higher than it was in previous years and the specific issue of opening marriage to same-sex couples is now supported by nearly two thirds of the population. The proportion of people supporting that policy is up from 41% in 2002 to 61% now. It is an enormous shift in views.

The survey also found that the group most resistant to supporting that policy is the group of people who attend religious worship at least once a week. There is far less corrolation between anti-gay views and people who go to worship less often than there is between the weekly worshippers. In other words, our problem is the pious.

There’s a mission issue there, actually. One interpretation of those figures is that the people who might be most likely to come to church more may well be being put off by the social attitudes on gay issues (which are becoming distinctively held by pious people) of those who do go. If your congregation puts out a negative message on gay people either from the pulpit or the negatively expressed prejudice of the most faithful then you may well be repelling not only gay people who might come but the most likely people who would otherwise come whatever their sexuality.

Yesterday during the Conversation which followed the Eucharist, Bishop Christopher Senyonjo asked me why I think this change in social attitudes has taken place. I named two things – firstly the courage of those who have come out. Rôle models are so important. At many levels of society there are gay and lesbian people willing to come out and be known. (The social attitudes survey shows that if someone believes they know a gay person their attidudes are much likely to be more accepting than if they don’t). Secondly, the establishment of Civil Partnerships has given people new positive images of gay people. Whereas once gay people were defined in people’s minds by what they did (or more likely were imagined to do) in bed, all of a sudden there is a new visual narrative. Cakes, rings, friends, family and joy have replaced other mental images. I’m not arguing that is liberation – it isn’t. It is conformity to a rather conservative mindset. However, right now in our history, it has been an incredibly important part of what has shifted people’s attitudes.

Thinking about this question a day later, I’d add a further answer. Thirdly, I’d say, the other big thing that has led to things changing is straight people being willing come out. The biggest shift in the last five years or so that I can think of is the emergence of straight allies unwilling to put up with prejudice against their gay friends, family members and colleagues. There have always been wonderful straight allies. But in recent years their numbers have blossomed. Straight people being willing to come out as straight allies and stand up to prejudice is a big part of the story.

A couple of years ago, I came to the view that the thing to concentrate on in the struggle was changing attitudes in society rather than the church. The time may be coming to think again about helping church folk to catch up with what God and good-hearted people are up to in the world. The problem, after all, is  the pious.

For now though, a time to celebrate an massive shift in Scottish social attitudes. And remember, if it can be achieved on this issue, it can be achived on all the rest too.

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There’s something odd

11 August 2011 By 8 Comments

You know, I just realised that there’s something odd going on in the world. We’ve recently had major earthquake, terror attack and rioting in the streets.

And no-one has been blaming the gays.

There are many struggles still to engage in and many places where LGBT people have little dignity, no human rights and minimal hope of change.

But we’re winning.

This video’s becoming history not commentary:

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Magna Carta

30 June 2011 By 5 Comments

I found myself at Euston yesterday, with a spare hour to kill, so I popped into the British Library, like you do, to have a look at the Codex Sinaiticus. A couple of months ago there was the following exchange at St Mary’s LGBT group, which had made me want to go and gaze in awe all over again…

Me: “Well, maybe that phrase in Romans is connected more with the preceding bit, remember there’s no punctuation in the earliest New Testament texts. No capital letters to indicate where sentences begin neither…”
Participants: “What? What?! No-one ever told us that. That can’t be right. It would mean you could never be absolutely certain of what any of the texts mean…”
Me: “Hmmm….”

Anyway, whilst I was there, I got distracted by Magna Carta and particularly by a comment that only three phrases in Magna Carta are still on the statute book in England. One of these guarentees the freedom of the English Church.

Can anyone tell me what that means?

What, in particular does it mean in relation to the Anglican Covenant?

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The Syrian Lesbian Blogger Story

15 June 2011 By 9 Comments

Most people will be familiar with the details by now.  A forty year old straight American male based in Edinburgh wrote a blog which purported to be written by a Syrian lesbian woman. And it took a lot of people in.

It is an interesting story on a number of levels. There has been a claim that he wrote it as a work of fiction and that people shouldn’t be cross with him as, we read novels, don’t we?

I can kind of buy into that argument a little, but not a lot. I am impressed with the way he wrote and the way that he managed to take most people in. Clearly he has talent. Straight men pretending to be lesbian are fairly unusual though and I’m still not entirely sure what I make of that part of the story. Apparently he carried on an internet romance with an American woman who for some months believed that she was in a relationship with a Syrian woman. That does seem to go beyond mere fiction to me.

I do know that I’d never posted a link to the blog itself myself because something didn’t ring true about it. I’m not saying that I always knew it was a fake. However, it always did seem just a little unlikely and I wasn’t confident enough about it to link to it. Not so the Guardian, which took up the blogger’s cause in a big way and even published an interview with “her” which it turns out was conducted entirely by email. Clearly there is a lesson to be learned there for someone.

No-one ever claimed to have met this blogger yet so many people believed the story to be authentic, perhaps because they simply wanted it to be true. Certainly the Arab Spring has been fuelled by social media but then so are most things that people do these days. It is becoming ubiquitous and people still have not learned the appropriate cautions.

Rather a while ago, the Scottish Episopal Church published some good guidelines for children in dealing with the online world. Part of those guidelines dealt with the fact, if I remember rightly, that not everyone online is who they purport to be. Of course, not everyone offline is who they purport to be either, but the internet, as ever, amplifies everything and makes it bigger, louder and in more people’s faces than old-fashioned offline deception.

I didn’t entirely buy into the Syrian lesbian story. I couldn’t quite believe it enough. It seemed at the time rather unlikely and in retrospect, extremely unlikely.

But then, for some people reading this blog in some parts of the world, the idea of an out, gay senior priest writing a blog about daily life in a Cathedral must seem just as unlikely.

And I’m very real.

Honest.

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What the Church of Scotland decided today

23 May 2011 By 11 Comments

Well, a significant debate in the Church of Scotland today on questions relating to ministers in same-sex relationships and also with regard to ministers who are looking to bless couples in same-sex relationships.

They have chosen a very modest step forward. It’s not a great triumph for the cause, but the alternative was worse.

So, how to understand what they actually did? (Don’t read the newspapers, as they are not all accurate. The Guardian is particularly culpable with an inaccurate and ridiculous report on its website claiming that the Church of Scotland has voted to allow gay ministers. It hasn’t).

So, what did they do?
Well, first of all if you want to understand this you need to read the report. You can find it here. At the start of it you can find the “deliverances” which are the various clauses that the church was debating today. I think that they all passed without amendment, so what you see at the start of that report is what they’ve now agreed. Except, and here is the crucial point, they chose option B for Clause 7 not option A.

They’ve agreed to have a new Theological Commission on same-sex issues. I don’t think that many people expect this new Commission to resolve everything, but they have given the Commission a trajectory – suggested a path to follow. What the Assembly agreed today was this:

Resolve to consider further the lifting of the moratorium on the acceptance for training and ordination of persons in a same-sex relationship, and to that end instruct the Theological Commission to prepare a report for the General Assembly of 2013 containing:
(i) a theological discussion of issues around same-sex relationships, civil partnerships and marriage;
(ii) an examination of whether, if the Church were to allow its ministers freedom of conscience in deciding whether to bless same-sex relationships involving life-long commitments, the recognition of such lifelong relationships should take the form of a blessing of a civil partnership or should involve a liturgy to recognise and celebrate commitments which the parties enter into in a Church service in addition to the civil partnership, and if so to recommend liturgy therefor;
(iii) an examination of whether persons, who have entered into a civil partnership and have made lifelong commitments in a Church ceremony, should be eligible for admission for training, ordination and induction as ministers of Word and Sacrament or deacons in the context that no member of Presbytery will be required to take part in such ordination or induction against his or her conscience; and to report to the General Assembly of 2013.

They have also agreed not to inhibit the induction to a congregation of ministers who were ordained before 2009 who happen to be in a same-sex relationship. This means that clergy in that position are not “stuck” in a place unable to consider a call to a new ministry whilst the work of the Theological Commission goes on. It will be for a further Assembly to decide what to do about any such persons. There was considerable debate about this, with many conservative commentators saying that it was going to open the floodgates and that there would be ministers in openly acknowledged same-sex coupledom being inducted in presbyteries up and down the land with all the concommitant fallout that this would bring. One Commissioner even said that the delivererance would allow him to leave his wife, take up with a man and still be inducted to a new charge.

They did make it rather sound as though the Church of Scotland was a hotbed of hitherto undisclosed gay couples in manses and that being gay was such fun that even the straight ministers of the kirk were dying to give it a go.

All in all the best possible outcome. It was a triumph of process rather than a triumph for the gay cause. However each step forward makes the journey possible and my good wishes go to all my presbyterian friends for a well conducted debate and a good outcome.

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