The Church Times devotes its lead editorial to an evisceration of the paper that the Church of England submitted to the British government expressing its opposition to same-sex marriage:
Many churchgoers woke on Tuesday morning to learn about their adamant opposition to same-sex marriage. Whether they agree with its position or not, they will find the paper submitted to the Government’s consultation on their behalf to be tendentious and poorly argued. In brief, it says that the government consultation on same-sex marriage is flawed (it is); that marriage has always been defined as between a man and a woman (it has); that matters such as consummation will be hard to work into a new definition (they will); and that there is a false distinction being made between civil and religious marriage (there is, although this is the Government’s clumsy attempt to preserve the Church’s right to discriminate).
Besides these points, however, the paper makes a number of unsupported claims. In just one example, it states that the view of marriage as “a lifelong union of one man with one woman” is “derived from the teaching of Christ himself”, first without citing which teaching, and second without any apparent embarrassment over the use of the word “lifelong”. The impression that Church and state have walked hitherto arm in arm up and down the aisle can be sustained only by ignoring the huge chasm over divorce that opened in the 19th century. Much is made of the Church’s supposed susceptibility to legal challenge; but again, this has not been its experience when clerics have refused second marriages in church. Hardest to follow are the paper’s arguments that the benefits society derives from heterosexual marriage will somehow be absent if marriage is extended to same-sex couples.
I wonder if our English readers can give us any sense of what sort of impact the Church of England’s paper is likely to have on the debate over this issue in the United Kingdom.