Not Again !
TheOrganist
Shipmate
in Purgatory
Just when you thought there might be a possibility of the CofE's bishops finally getting the message that they need to pause and reflect (really, not just lip service) before coming out with something guaranteed to alienate they come up with this.
Whether or not you agree with them, the people who fought long and hard for the right of heterosexual couples to be able to have a civil partnership did so because they desperately wanted some means of showing to the world that they were in a committed relationship without the patriarchal overtones of marriage. All good, you would have thought: the Church says it wants to encourage committed (covenanted even) relationships, at least among heterosexuals, and this is another way of people registering their committment to each other.
The response from the Church of England is to choose to alienate yet another group of people by declaring that civil partners should be celibate: you couldn't make it up.
Whether or not you agree with them, the people who fought long and hard for the right of heterosexual couples to be able to have a civil partnership did so because they desperately wanted some means of showing to the world that they were in a committed relationship without the patriarchal overtones of marriage. All good, you would have thought: the Church says it wants to encourage committed (covenanted even) relationships, at least among heterosexuals, and this is another way of people registering their committment to each other.
The response from the Church of England is to choose to alienate yet another group of people by declaring that civil partners should be celibate: you couldn't make it up.
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To expand a bit on my one-liner: their whole statement is predicated on the idea that there is such a thing as the Church's teaching on sex. But what does 'the Church's teaching' even mean, given that the Church of England has no concept of a Magisterium? Even people who take the conservative line on sexual issues do so because the Bible (in their view) says so, not because the House of Bishops says so.
I rather think the majority of Anglican laity (and that's a very small proportion of the population of the country) don't care what the bishops think about anything...
But yes - this constant obsession with Secks and Philth is tiresome, to say the least.
As @TheOrganist says, you couldn't make it up. Fruitcakes in pointy hats (and I bet some of them are gay, and NOT celibate)!
As for pastoral sensitivity, they're on a par with bed-bugs.
It's in the OP and it's all true. Sometimes the church really is beyond parody. No doubt the meeting that signed this policy off then went onto discuss why the people think the church is irrelevant and what they could do to tackle that ...
But how can they abandon grammatico-historical legalism?
Bearing in mind how slanted the Guardian report is, one should also definitely check the original before the Mail or the Telegraph get their hands on it.
Having skim read the actual policy document, the Guardian article seems to be an accurate reflection of what they've announced. Unless I missed something glaringly obvious.
AFAIAC there is no ambiguity in the piece in The Grauniad: the bishops are indeed saying civil partnership = no sex.
Yes, you can plough through the whole thing and try to come to a conclusion that their lordship's aren't really saying that but you're onto a loser. And just in case you're in any doubt, here is paragraph 35, the Conclusion of the PS:
Sure, they try to sweeten the pill with the usual guff about ministering sensitively and pastorally (how else can clergy minister but pastorally?) but we all know what that means: the more empathetic will, IMHO rightly, ignore the guidance, the MOTR will be embarassed by it and try to explain it away with a wry smile, and the tub-thumping Hotline-to-God brigade will see it as another opportunity to condemn perfectly decent people.
Far from wondering why our churches are so empty, we should wonder that anyone comes at all.
I think they are actually saying sex = marriage only, which is not quite the same thing.
So I was told by our former p-in-c, Father Fu*kwit.
So by saying that clergy must not bless civil partnerships, the Bishops are not just saying that the church does not recognise civil partnerships - they are saying that civil partnerships are wicked and immoral, and as such unworthy of blessing.
Quakers accept any sort of relationship. And, TBF, we don't really care whether you have sex or not. We are more concerned that you are in a happy, committed relationship.
Because we are not obsessed with sex, controlling people, or what goes on between consenting adults.
Because with the world on the brink of climate breakdown, warmongering, selfish, shitty piles of foetid sewage in charge of the US and the UK, plastic threatening to engulf the planet - there are far more important things to focus on.
I think the underlying logic is sound on its axioms - that is, if it is immoral for an unmarried person to have sex, and civil partnership is quite explicitly not a marriage, then it is immoral to have sex within a civil partnership.
The problems I think are:
a. It's not clear that it is in any meaningful sense the teaching of the church that unmarried people should not have sex.
b. I'm not sure the Church of England has a coherent idea of what constitutes 'marriage' any more. If you define it socially - i.e., marriage is what society considers to be marriage - then gay marriage is marriage; if you define it as a set of relationships that fulfil certain criteria (fidelity, exclusivity, commitment, etc), then many civil partnerships will fulfil those criteria too.
There’s no reason why such a form should be anything other than “reverent and seemly” or why it should be either “contrary to, [or] indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter“.
The fact that the HoB isn’t going to produce a generally authorised public liturgy doesn’t prevent anyone else from producing something suitable.
Just so - but getting the House of Bed-BugsBishops to think along these sensible, and pragmatic, lines is probably an impossible task.
Unfortunately, I am color blind and could not see the link.
O! Sorry - I didn't know...but I wonder how many other Shipmates might miss a link if it isn't quoted in full, as per BroJames' post?
Can any couples who are not legally able to get married (close blood relatives, for example) obtain a civil partnership?
The official table of differences is here: https://gov.uk/government/publications/marriage-and-civil-partnership-in-england-and-wales
The most noticeable difference is that adultery only applies as a grounds for divorce in a marriage.
I don’t know, and I wouldn’t have thought of it because I see the links as red and text as black, and I’m not familiar with that kind of colour-blindness.
Some (many ?) browsers allow you to set the colour (and possibly other attributes) of links to overcome that issue. There’s a how-to guide on the BBC website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/guides/change_colours/browser/win/
I think this is the non-technical problem. The CoE appears to have a sacramental, not a secular view of marriage. (back to blast radii of wedding blessings...) Not for the first time, I like the French solution of marriage being thoroughly a civil affair and anything religious being a blessing of that for those that so choose. Disestablishment would solve this in a stroke.
Here's an interesting graph I just found on same-sex and opposite-sex (civil) marriage and civil partnerships in France over the past 20 years or so.
I think that kind of commitment is blessed in the love and care that they have for each other. The fact that the Church doesn't recognise that is a monumental failure in understanding on their part.
I don't see how you conclude that disestablishment would solve this problem -- there is no established church in Canada, for example, and yet no approach to the (admirable) French solution of marriage being civil and anything religious being other. And the same would go for countries liek the US...indeed, marriage as a civil event only is not found in many many countries which do not have an established church.
1) Is marriage primarily a sacrament/ritual that legitimizes appropriate sexual activity
(OR)
2) Is marriage primarily a sacrament/ritual that recognizes the love between two people
Because frankly for most of church history since Augustine, it has been more akin to (1) than to (2), I suspect because it is a hangover from the ascetics, who probably saw sexual relations as a threat to the call for humanity to love God.
The CofE is still stuck at (1) whereas most people today, are (2).
As has already been observed, the whole notion that the church has anything at all to do with marriage status is something that the English-speaking world has clung to far more than most of the rest of the planet.
IMHO, countries that have allowed civil partnership as some kind of placation of the supposed defenders of marriage have done the logic of the law a massive disservice. And they also did a massive disservice for a long time (and still do in some places) to homosexual couples when they said they could have civil partnership but not marriage. All that did was allow the bigots to think "but you're not really married".
And it enables that thinking against heterosexual couples as well.
Just have one system of legal recognition of sexual partnerships. Call it marriage. Tell the churches they can perform whatever rituals they like and have whatever rules they like (such as the Catholic one about divorcees) but the State decides what partnerships it will recognise. The end.
I'm not talking about anything sexual, though those relationships might exist within the group.
I'm not sure that hospital visiting privileges is even a legal perk, as opposed to hospitals having policies about these things.
As for the genuinely legal stuff, anything that is on a 'group' basis rather than a 'couple' one has the potential to create rather novel issues that might take quite some time to figure out. We pretty much treat a family as a couple plus dependants.
I'm sure it's possible for us to move beyond that, but my point was more about how we've ended up inventing "civil partnership" to cover exactly the same couples territory that was already covered. That involved introducing complexity for no logical reason, ie it was done purely for the politics of it.
The squeaminess of crafting rules about who may do what in which beds--all strictly on the honor system, mind you--just boggles the mind.
Which is ironic, given that Article XXV denies that marriage is a sacrament ...
I think the problem is that for most of the Church of England's history, canon law has been able to define the civil requirements for a marriage, and so the Church of England has never properly explored what happens when the civil concept of a marriage deviates noticeably from the Church's (official) view.
It would be nice to think that disestablishment would force the lords bishops to consider this problem. On current form, though, they seem to think that any attempt by the state to deviate from the Church of England's view is a gross betrayal - hence the Archbishop of York claiming that Mr Cameron was 'behaving like a dictator' in 'redefining marriage'. I'm not sure if they are capable of the necessary degree of reflection ...
You're probably right that disestablishment wouldn't solve this, but it might stop the CoE assuming it somehow spoke with the authority of a state. The UK practice of a religious ceremony being in very many cases co-mingled with the civil one, with ministers of religion entitled to perform a ceremony with civil value, makes a French head explode.
@orfeo I don't think civil partnerships cover exactly the same ground as marriage. At least here, they are easier to get out of - a significant difference in a world with far fewer very long-term relationships - much less public, and seem often to serve as a first step before a civil marriage. I think tax and who counts as next of kin and parent are also different, though I'm not very up to date on this.
It also seems to me that some same-sex couples very explicitly wanted a status that afforded similar protections that wasn't marriage, with its opposite-sex and religious connotations, while others have militated for marriage out of a desire to obtain exactly the same rights, exactly the same recognition, and some kind of an end to the conservative religious connotations.
For centuries, ordinary people just started living together as husband and wife.
The whole notion that the church wants you to have the right piece of paper is a relatively recent idea in the scheme of things.
And it was 1836 when people started being allowed to have non-church formal marriages.
So this whole "most of the Church of England's history" notion? It covers a period of 83 years.