Where You go I Will go, Where you Stay I Will Stay

I'm a good little C of E girl. I bell ring and I sing in the church choir. Every year I get paid to help out at several weddings, here is some of what I have learnt.

1. The reading will always be ‘Love is patient, love is kind....’
2. The priest only prepares one sermon, which they will use for every single wedding in their entire career.
3. Brides wearing heels need to watch the floor; old churches have heating grates that like to eat people.
4. One of the hymns will always be Jerusalem.
5. They will always be between a man and a woman.

Points 1-4 I'm resigned to. Although, there’s a lovely passage in Ruth about what Love is, if anyone straight fancies breaking up the routine for me.  It’s point 5 I have an issue with.

My church has several gay members of the congregation and gay clergy men. One of these charming men came with me to a massive C of E conference to meet our local bishop. At this conference we were mixed up with strangers and split into groups. My group was lovely; we built a church out of pipe-cleaners and started brainstorming about how to bring the church forward. Unluckily for my gay clergy man, he sat next to a pillock who went on the entire time about how it was the churches responsibility to ban homosexuality. Had it been me, I would have dragged the homophobe up to the bishop by his ear, and demanded that the bishop pray for his immortal soul, or read aloud pretty much any of the new testament.

My priest (a woman if anyone is curious) once said to me that she would rather be punished when she died for supporting LGBTQ love, than be punished for condemning it. This seemed to her like good enough reason not to be a bigot. In contrast, one of the gay members of the congregation received a death threat from another member of the congregation, because he had been seen in public with his partner. If anybody is wondering what happened, the threatening letter was handed over to the police by my previous priest and the member of the congregation dealt with accordingly.

As an obviously, less than straight member of the congregation, I find these entire goings on quite concerning. What I’m trying to get across with these anecdotes, is that clearly the church is conflicted. The truly dedicated Christians, in my experience are the ones who will leave the judging to God. They are the ones who give the homeless- even though they may be alcoholic drug addicted whores- money on the street. They are the ones who can ignore passages of the bible that tell us to stone the unfaithful wives, those who’ve had sex before marriage and homosexuals. This has been my experience, but perhaps it is not true for everyone.

When we studied terrorism in philosophy, an interesting point was raised. Terrorists believe what they are doing is right, some believe they are doing the work of their God or Gods. But what if these extremists are misinterpreting their religion, how can we ever know if what they are doing is right? The bible, or any other religious text, doesn’t change depending on who reads it or when we read it. It’s a text or text that should be timeless. To claim it means one thing is to lessen that. To claim objectively that it means we should kill certain groups of people, or condemn them, is to restrict the religious text's applications to just that.

Leviticus, the chapter of the bible which speaks most famously about homosexuality, is also the chapter of the bible which condemns tattoos, shellfish and pork. Many homophobes forget that. I have always believed that the bible has these things in more as health warnings than anything else. I appreciate that Judaism upholds some of these laws very literally, but as a Church of England member, I have come to understand that eating shellfish in the times of the bible would have resulted in food poisoning. Gay sex, even now, has more health risks associated with it than straight sex. Some of this is a social stigma, but part of it is practicality. Back in the good old days, anal tearing would’ve killed you. Though, granted, the fear mongering and death penalty does seem a very extreme warning.

So you can see that religion has many different interpretations. My view is that good Christianity means not judging unless you are actually Jesus. So you can probably put 2 and 2 together and realise that as a bisexual I must support gay marriage. I’m lucky enough to live in England, which means that if I want I can get married in a registry office, and all the legalities of a normal marriage will apply. But to me, lack of a church wedding is the same as saying that our relationship isn’t worthy to be blessed in God’s house. A wedding is standing in church with the people you love and making a vow with God’s blessing. Why should that be any different if who you love isn’t a member of the opposite sex?

Wow, this has been a long post; I guess it’s something I feel strongly about. I used to picture myself married to a guy in my head. Though now I think that was more social conditioning than anything else. I once had a dream that Eli and I were getting married, and we had to find a church that had an isle wide enough for both our wedding dresses.  I’m worried that one day soon I’ll want to marry someone I love and be told ‘No, you can go to a registry office, God doesn’t want you here’.  

My God is a God of Love. Why should LGBTQ love be excluded from that?

Have fun,

Mel

xxx