Civil Partnership Act and Gay Marriage?

The Civil Partnership Act 2004, which allows gay couples to register their relationships legally, comes into force on Monday. The General Register Office has just sent out a letter to ministers like myself who conduct weddings. It is headed ‘Changes In Terminology In Marriage Registers’. It states that ‘Civil partnership will be a lawful impediment to marriage’ (and then goes on to lay out new terms that must be used to describe a person’s ‘condition’ at the time of marriage). Isn’t this a bit rich from a government that has told us that civil partnership is not the same as gay marriage?
 
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Ake Green acquitted

Yesteday Swedish Pentecostal pastor (not ‘priest’, please, BBC!) Ake Green was acquitted of hate crimes against homosexuals. I am partly relieved, partly disturbed.
 
Relieved, because I hold to the conviction that Christian ethics require fidelity in marriage and chastity outside.
 
Disturbed, due to this extract from the BBC report:

In the sermon, Mr Green told a congregation on the small south-eastern island of Oland that homosexuals were “a deep cancer tumour on all of society” and that gays were more likely than other people to rape children and animals.

 
A website run by his supporters contains evidence that individual homosexuals are more likely to be paedophiles than individual heterosexuals. This is because although there are three times as many incidents of heterosexual child abuse than homosexual, the relative proportions of heterosexual and homosexual people makes the homosexuals more likely to offend.
 
Even if this is so, it makes me wonder about labelling homosexuals this way. All child abuse is wrong.
 
I remember a student on placement with me who told me he had given a midweek church group ‘the biblical view’ on homosexuality. I knew what he meant. But he had missed out God’s love for all people. Had he really given the biblical view?
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Pope May Suspend Limbo

According to a Reuters report the Catholic Church may replace the doctrine of limbo – the place where unbaptised deceased babies go, suspended between heaven and hell. Not before time, in the view of this Protestant/free church/non-Catholic/whatever I am. The idea that God cannot be gracious without a sacrament is pretty offensive.
 
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Give Us This Day Our Daily Chicken

From this month’s Grove Books email:
 
The phone rang in the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was Kentucky Fried Chicken.

‘Archbishop, we will give you £100,000 to the Church if you change the Lord’s Prayer to say “Give us today our daily chicken.”‘

‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that,’ replied the ABC. ‘It would mean undoing hundred– thousands–of years of Christian tradition.’

The next week KFC phoned back again.

‘We will give you £500,000 to change the Lord’s prayer.’

‘I’m sorry, these are Christ’s own words–I cannot change them’

The next week KFC phoned again.

‘We will give you £10 million.’

‘I’m sorry, the words are in the Bible–I cannot change them.’

Finally, KFC phoned a last time.

‘We will give you £100 million to change the line.’

The ABC thought hard. The money could help a lot of people; it could make the gospel known to the whole country; it really could do a power of good. ‘All right’, he replied, ‘I will propose the change to the Archbishops’ Council and Synod.’

After much thought and prayer, despite the fact that the words were the Lord’s own, that it meant changing thousands of year of Christian tradition, that the words are in the Bible, the Council agreed to present the change to General Synod–after all, the money could do a lot of good.

So at the next Synod, the ABC stands up.

‘I’ve got some good news, and some bad news.

The good news is that we are being given £100 million.

The bad news–I think we’ve lost the Hovis account.’

 
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Buy Nothing Day

Tomorrow is International Buy Nothing Day – an annual event to expose the wickedness of consumerism. Wouldn’t you know that two of the three churches I serve are having Christmas fairs tomorrow? Rather like the way we protest against Sunday trading but have church bookstalls or fair trade stalls on a Sunday. Or more seriously, like the way too much of church culture bows down at the idol of consumerism. Christian retailers speak of ‘product’. I once saw a bookseller advertise ‘this indispensable book’ – and it wasn’t the Bible. We are dreadfully compromised.
 
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