Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Sunday, July 06, 2003

Oh, you stupid fucking bastards. You stupid, stupid, bastards.

Well, Canon Jeffrey John has decided not to take up his position as Bishop of Reading. Having had his personal life rooted through, his sex life examined, a series of inquiries made into just what he might do with his penis and a miasma of innuendo and abuse raised up around him that is unlikely to disperse for the rest of his career in the Church of England.

Would John have made a good bishop? I have no idea. His suitability to be the Bishop of Reading, his relationship with the diocese, his assiduity and ability to handle the step up - not one of these was allowed to detain the stampede towards his sexual activities, or lack thereof, for more than a moment. I imagine that Oxford and Canterbury had their reasons to believe he might not do a bad job. Who knows?

What I do know is that if you are a member of the Church of England wishing to do the best for your gay colleague, the thing to do is never to mention his name. Certainly don't put him forward for a promotion. Or, before you know it, extremists will be decrying him as an abomination and demanding to know details of his sex life that a male vicar with a female partner would be unlikely to be quizzed about.

The levels of hypocrisy here are like onionskin. Of course, on one level there is the sheer insanity of the fact that, were every gay man in the Church of England to be purged, the entire instituion would, if anecdote, rumour and supposition have any strength, collapse overnight. But that is a side-issue, really - no more hypocritical than coke-snorting journalists reporting in shock and dismay the drug abuse of their quarries.

More clearly and more desperately, what we have here is members of a church notionally based on creeds of universal love, forgiveness and redemption realising that, when the moment is right and the prey sufficiently unprotected, they can have a really good turn at kicking the queer without having to worry about any possible repercussions, or to believe themselves in any way compelled to scrutinise the morality of their actions.

Thus Richard Ingrams has rather mised the point in his latest determined assault on his own credibility here. Leaving aside the suitability of the cases of Hodge and John for comparison as the random sparkings of a mind on a deadline, it seems clear that this is not a case of the Church of England foundering by attempting to dilute its creed in support of the young. Gay clergy, even in all likelihood gay bishops, have a proud anecdotal existence in the history of the Church of England. He is at least correct in identifying the importance of Canon John being a self-confessed homosexual, that is somebody not attempting to deceive himself or God. If he (John, rather than Ingrams) had only married and either gone into a self-flagellating pose of denial, or struck up an understanding with his wife, none of this awkwardness would have ensued. It is his temerity in assuming that love is universally a good thing and a cause for celebration that has doomed him. So, an attempt to appeal to the youth by diluting creed hardly seems to be the issue. The issue is that a tolerant, albeit highly traditional and arguably hidebound church, with some younger liberal elements and a modernising tendency that sees greater inclusivity as vital to the future of the institution, has found itself caught before the guns of a group of wealthy and voluble hard-liners and evangelicals (many of them perfectly youthful, thanks, Richard) who believe themselves to be defending the one universal right of the devout; the right to believe oneself better than whomever one might wish.

0 Comments: