Church says you can choose to be gay but not to be straight
by Jules Gomes, TCW:
[…] The overwhelming majority of participants, including 36 out of 37 bishops, backed Jayne Ozone’s motion calling for its ban. Now, no longer will someone with an unwelcome homosexual urge be able to seek spirit counselling or therapy. Celebrate it and sanctify it, the Church might as well say.
How are we to interpret this diktat? It is clear – if you are attracted to a person of the same sex this is an exercise of your free will, but if you make an informed choice (as an adult) to ask your vicar for help or to pray that God will take away your homosexual desires, and if your vicar does so, it lands him with a disciplinary charge! In a word there is no choice. You are constrained.
General Synod theology now has it that you are free to choose to be gay but not to chose to be straight. Homosexuality is immutable. Heterosexuality is not. And God meanwhile is impotent in the matter – heaven forfend he go against General Synod or fails to rejoice every conversion to homosexuality.
Believe it or not, in order to try to protect God’s freedom to intervene (and the Holy Spirit’s freedom to convert a person from homosexual to heterosexual attraction), the Rev Dr Sean Doherty had to move an amendment affirming that ‘pastoral care, prayer ministry: that professional counselling were “legitimate means of supporting individuals who choose them freely, provided that they respect the property dignity of human beings, and do not involve coercion or manipulation or make unwarranted promises about the removal of unwanted feelings.’”
He was roundly defeated for his pains. Synod rejected prayer, pastoral care, counselling and free choice in favour of the new LGBTIQ gender orthodoxy.
If this were not perverse enough, in a gigantic leap of oxymoronic policy-making, General Synod went on to vote for creating new liturgies to affirm the new gender of a person who has ‘transitioned’. Who implored General Synod to vote for such specially designed ‘liturgies’ to welcome a transgender person under their new name? The uncritically accepting Sentamu, who appears to have put not Satan, but science as well as God behind him.
One brave enough to vote against him was Ed Shaw, an evangelical member of General Synod, worried not simply that no one had defined exactly it was that was to be banned under the general term ‘conversion therapy’, but also that genuine pastoral care of LGBT people could be badly affected by the ban. No one else cared. No guarantees were given, no amendments considered. But will Ed Shaw’s fear of the CofE’s new totalitarianism keep Sentamu awake at night? Not, I fear, in a million years.
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