The following letter from Canon Chris Sugden first appeared in the May 21, 2013 eidtion of the AAC’s International Update. Sign up for this free email here.
Dear American friends
First, many condolences to the citizens of Oklahoma City on the tragedy of Monday’s tornado, specially to those who have lost their children.
Today the House of Commons will give a third reading to the Same-Sex Couples bill which will then pass to the House of Lords on June 3rd. Yesterday, 150 MPs voted for amendments to provide accommodation for registrars who in conscience could not take same-sex marriage ceremonies and to protect the religious beliefs of a person who believes that marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman. Over 340 voted against these principles of freedom.
Opponents of the bill have been finding their voice. In addition to a well-supported prayer vigil outside Parliament on Monday and Tuesday, a letter to the Prime Minister from 35 Conservative Association Chairmen and other senior officials warned him that the same-sex marriage bill is driving voters to UKIP (a budding political party) and could cost the Conservative Party the next election. It also breaks a promise made just days before the general election that the PM was not planning to redefine marriage.
Same-sex marriage has always been the principle reason for the defections from the Conservative Party, but this has been consistently ignored by the Prime Minister and the media. A leading political inquisitor, Jeremy Paxman, noted that gay marriage was a very significant reason for party defections.
Leading evangelical Anglican vicars of large churches with combined congregations of 150,000 full of young people wrote a letter to the press warning that hundreds of thousands of young students and workers across the country who hold a fuller view of marriage based on religion or tradition will suffer discrimination and face new risks to their careers, and futures, if the Bill passes in its present form.
For the first time in the discussion, 500 imams wrote publicly that “we are concerned that this radical change to the institution of marriage will impact on what is taught in schools. Muslim teachers will be forced into the contradictory position of holding private beliefs, while teaching a new legal definition of marriage. ”
The constitutional issues will impress the Lords when they debate the issue on June 3rd. Mary Douglas writes “And yet, ‘our’ government proposes to do this with no democratic mandate. Not in any manifesto, not in the Coalition Agreement, no Green Paper, no White Paper, not in any Queen’s Speech. And against a promise made by our Prime Minister, on national TV, three days before the last General Election, that he would never introduce ‘gay marriage’.
A sham ‘consultation’, of which any tin-pot dictator would be proud! An unfairly weighted Committee and a parliamentary debate in which MP’s were restricted to four minutes each. Four minutes to defend the institution of marriage!”
Further on the constitutional front, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a former Lord Chancellor, said in a lecture in London on Church and State on Ascension Day, in response to a question on the Coronation Oath [to maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England], (according to my notes at the time) : “The sovereign is expected to act in accordance with the advice of her ministers. It is the responsibility of the ministers of the crown to see that their advice is consonant with a proper construction of the oath. I hope that a contradiction between what she is advised and what she has sworn will never arise. I hope it won’t”.
