UPDATED: 6:30 PM
Bravo Church of England!
General Synod – pensions for surviving civil partners
Read the complete story at Thinking Anglicans
UPDATE: from The Guardian
The Church of England may not allow its clergy to have their civil partnerships blessed in church but it voted tonight to allow the survivors of same-sex partnerships the same pension rights as other spouses.
The church’s General Synod, meeting in London, voted in favour of what supporters of the move described as big-heartedness at odds with the church’s public reputation for homophobia in its wrangles over gay clergy.
In doing so, members saw off a wrecking amendment by conservative evangelicals to extend equal pension rights to all clergy relatives who might have lived in their households for five years. A move by bishops that, instead of equal pensions rights, partners should be allowed to apply for hardship grants was also seen off.
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Although the church does not allow services for same-sex clergy and requires them to give assurances to their bishops that their relationships are chaste, it had conceded the principle that civil partners should receive pension rights – but only from December 2005 when the civil partnerships legislation came into force. This means surviving partners in long-term relationships would lose out for many years to come.
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It is not known how many clergy have entered civil partnerships, but the inequity was spelled out by Simon Baynes, a synod member from St Albans diocese. He told the meeting that the dean of St Albans, Jeffrey John – who was denied a bishopric by Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, seven years ago after protests by evangelicals because he had been in a same-sex partnership for many years – would receive only £307 a year after his partner, also a clergyman, died, whereas if he had married a woman a few days before his death, she would receive an annual pension of £7,550.
Baynes said: “Employers who pay as little as they can get away with are the nastiest and the church should not be among them. The church would look very mean.”