Colin Coward of Changing Attitude continues his critique of Anglican bully boy N. T Wright, the Bishop of Durham:
Durham refers to ‘certain habits and styles of life’ which are left behind when people rise to new life in Christ (para. 6). LGBT people do not have ‘certain habits’ which are different from the habits of heterosexuals. Nor do we have distinctive ‘styles of life’. His language is deliberately chosen to demean LGBT people. I have met hundreds of LGBT Christians whose lives are characterised by holiness and a renewed humanity. The bishop cannot know the people of his own diocese well if he hasn’t discerned holiness in many of his partnered lesbian and gay clergy and laity. Perhaps, like other bishops I know, he is blind to their presence.
In para. 12 the bishop addresses sex and ‘rights’. He refers to ‘those with homosexual and similar instincts’. He is wearied by the need to spell out yet again the difference, for those with such instincts, between their human dignity and civil liberty and their ‘rights’ as practising let alone ordained Christians.
I am wearied by his use of the phrase ‘homosexual instincts’. Lesbian and gay people do not have ‘instincts’ that distinguish them from heterosexual people. We have exactly the same range of human physical and emotional desires, the same ability to engage in appropriate adult behaviour and relationships. In the bishop’s mind we are not human beings similar in every way to heterosexuals but deficient in some way, corrupted, perverse.