This Bill, for the first time in British history, fundamentally seeks to break the existing legal link between the institution of marriage and sexual exclusivity, loyalty, and responsibility for the children of the marriage. If the Bill passes, several previously foundational aspects of the law of marriage will be changed to accommodate same sex
couples: the common law presumption that a child born to a mother during her marriage is also the child of her partner will not apply in same sex marriages (Schedule 4, para. 2); the existing provisions on divorce will be altered so that sexual infidelity by one of the parties in a same sex marriage with another same sex partner will not constitute adultery (Schedule 4, para. 3); and nonconsummation will not be a ground on which a same sex marriage is voidable (Schedule 4, para. 4).

Marriage thus becomes an institution in which openness to children, and with it the responsibility on fathers and mothers to remain together to care for children born into their family unit, is no longer central to society’s understanding of that institution (as reflected in the law). The fundamental problem with the Bill is that changing the legal understanding of marriage to accommodate same sex partnerships threatens subtly, but radically, to alter the meaning of marriage over time for everyone. This is the heart of our argument in principle against same sex marriage….

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Our government is coalescing around Pastor Saeed, but it is still moving too slow and engaging at too low a level. Two weeks ago 49 Members of Congress (37 from the House and 12 Senators) sent letters to the State Department urging “strong and sustained” advocacy on Saeed’s behalf. On Friday we reported that the State Department and White House made near-identical comments within moments of each other that clearly and unequivocally called for Pastor Saeed’s release.

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One would have hoped that the Seattle opinion and common sense would be sufficient, but FEMA has apparently reverted to a position that provides less than full participation for religious institutions. Its reasons for doing so are not entirely clear but seem to include a mix of constitutional, statutory and regulatory concerns.

Many of these concerns should have been put to rest by the Oklahoma City experience and Congress’s approval of aid to religious organizations there. Nobody suggests that government should entirely rebuild sanctuaries or pay for the printing of prayer books. But if roofs are being repaired and other structural damage is being remediated, the religious nature of what might occur below shouldn’t matter. That is consistent with the reasoning of a 2003 Justice Department opinion that permitted the federal government to provide assistance to help restore the landmarked Old North Church in Boston.

In essence, federal disaster relief is a form of social insurance meant to help repair a tear in our social fabric. Houses of worship are an important part of that social fabric and are often where people turn for comfort and support after a disaster. After Hurricane Sandy, they are equally in need of repair and should be equally eligible for assistance.

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The Church of England has dropped its prohibition on gay clergy in civil partnerships becoming bishops.

The announcement, from the Church’s House of Bishops, would allow gay clergy to become bishops if they promise to be celibate.

Conservative evangelical Anglicans say they will fight the move in the Church’s ruling general synod.

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A troubling year lies ahead for church and state relations. All the signs are that Members of Parliament are flexing their muscles over the General Synod vote on women bishops.

They would like nothing less than to bounce the Church of England into an early decision, and some are actively seeking to interfere with a decision-making process that uniquely ties the Church and State together. Many supporters of women bishops will welcome this support from Parliament for their cause. Many of us agree that the Church of England must act quickly to resolve a question that has already been settled, not least by the overwhelming support of diocesan Synods. But threats from Parliament are unhelpful for many reasons.
In particular, dispersed power and the separation of British institutions are fundamental to our constitution. If any British institution seeks greater powers over another the balance of the British state is upset. We should expect Members of Parliament to exercise great restraint when it comes to their power. An over-mighty Parliament is as much a danger as an over-mighty Church. Both have their own respective responsibilities and rights and to overstep these is to upset a balance that has been worked out over centuries.

Religious freedom is threatened by a state that seeks to impose its own thinking on the Church. This is why the government’s pretence that it can outlaw the Church of England and the Church in Wales from ”˜opting-in’ to same-sex marriage is such a curious claim. It misunderstands the nature of marriage itself, which cannot be divided into civil and religious marriage. It forgets that canon law is also the law of the land. And it is an overreaching of government power.

The fourth element of the so-called quadruple lock is merely a recognition of the status quo, that only the churches can initiate change to their own canon law. Any move to compel the Church in one direction or another is completely unacceptable.

–Church of England Newspaper, January 6, 2013 edition

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Pity the prime minister. With most news bleakly austere these days, changing the law to let gay couples marry must have seemed a sure way to spread crowd-pleasing sweetness and light. Countries around the world are giving homosexuals full marriage rights. More than half of British respondents usually tell pollsters they favour gay marriage. Besides, David Cameron truly believes in it, as he told the Conservative Party conference in October 2011.

But government plans to let same-sex couples not only marry but marry in church, detailed on December 11th, have startled the ecclesiastical horses and divided the already fissiparous Conservatives. The Anglican and Catholic churches, along with the Muslim Council of Britain and Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, oppose the move, which contravenes their belief that marriage is between a woman and a man. High-profile Tories including Michael Gove, the education secretary, and Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, are for the change, but over 100 Conservative MPs are believed to oppose it. That will not put the outcome in doubt, as Labour and the Liberal Democrats support the shift, but it guarantees a continuing row.

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You have said you are an enthusiastic supporter of marriage and that you do not want “gay people to be excluded from a great institution.” Yet I wish respectfully to point out that behind what you say lurks a basic philosophical misconception about the nature of ‘equality.’ Equality can never be an absolute value, only a derivative and relative value. After all, a man cannot be a mother nor a woman a father, and so men and women can never be absolutely equal, only relatively equal, since they are biologically different. So too with marriage. Marriage, ever since the dawn of human history, is a union for life and love between a man and a woman. It is a complementary relationship between two people of the opposite sex, the man and the woman not being the same, but different. They are not, in other words, absolutely equal but relatively equal. This is why gay couples, two men or two women, are not being ”˜excluded’ from marriage; they simply cannot enter marriage.

By enabling gays to ‘marry’ and by equating the union of gay people with marriage, however well-intentioned, you are not only redefining what we mean by marriage but actually undermining the very nature, meaning and purpose of marriage. Marriage, and the home, children and family life it generates, is the foundation and basic building block of our society. If you proceed with your plans, you will gravely damage the value of the family, with catastrophic consequences for the well-being and behaviour of future generations. The 2011 Census shows the parlous state of the institution of marriage which you claim to believe in so strongly, and of family life in general, with one in two teenagers no longer living with their birth parents and over 50% of adults living outside of marriage.

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The Coalition… [Monday] announced new proposals to legalise same-sex weddings in churches, synagogues and other faith organisations that choose to opt in.
The Church of England and the Church in Wales are to be explicitly banned by law from holding same-sex weddings under the Bill.
Maria Miller, the equalities minister, promised that “watertight” protections would prevent religious organisations from being forced to conduct same-sex weddings against their wishes.
However, she admitted that the Government was powerless to prevent campaigners bringing legal action against churches in an attempt to overturn the safeguards.

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Marriage is not the property of the Government nor is it the property of the Church, the Rt Rev Tim Stephens, Bishop of Leicester, reminded Parliament in a response to the Government statement on equal marriage in the House of Lords, today.

While the forms and legalities around marriage had evolved over time, he said, one fundamental feature had remained the same throughout: that marriage is a union of one man and one woman, a social institution that pre-dates both Church and State and has been the glue that has bound countless successive societies together.

The Bishop asked for assurances that, for example, teachers would not be disciplined for upholding traditional religious teachings and that proper time would be given for consultation.

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Legislation to clear the way for gay marriage in the UK will include an opt-in for churches who favour the change, British prime minister David Cameron has said.

His declaration threatens a major revolt by Conservative MPs opposed to his plans when the issue will be decided in a free-vote in the House of Commons.

Saying he did not want gay couples “excluded from a great institution”, Mr Cameron insisted that churches opposed to gay marriage will not and cannot be forced to sanctify them.

However, the plans are more developed than they were when they were first produced last March, when it proposed civil ceremonies only.

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It is important to be clear that insistence on the traditional understanding of marriage is not knee-jerk resistance to change but is based on a conviction that the consequences of change will not be beneficial for society as a whole. Our concern is for the way the meaning of marriage will change for everyone, gay or straight, if the proposals are enacted. Because we believe that the inherited understanding of marriage contributes a vast amount to the common good, our defence of that understanding is motivated by a concern for the good of all in society.

The proposition that same-sex relationships can embody crucial social virtues is not in dispute. To that extent, the Prime Minister’s claim that he supports same-sex marriage from conservative principles is readily understandable. However, the uniqueness of marriage is that it embodies the underlying, objective, distinctiveness of men and women. This distinctiveness and complementarity are seen most explicitly in the biological union of man and woman which potentially brings to the relationship the fruitfulness of procreation.

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The parliamentary reaction to this week’s synod vote tells a powerful tale. Wearing his Garrick Club tie, the Second Church Estates Commissioner answered questions from MP’s, all of whom expressed amazement and moral repugnance about the official and institutionalised sexism of the Established Church. (note to overseas readers ”” The Garrick Club is an exclusive Gentleman’s club in the West End).

The Garrick Club Tie Gaffe (if such it was) underlined an important aspect of the problem: the Church claims to be far more than a private organisation like a golf club, masonic lodge, or Gentleman’s London hang-out. It claims to be good news for everyone, and the fury of our legislators when they see it acting as though it were a private club, disconnected from society, was unmistakable….

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Though the Church of England is now the only church within these islands and within the 80 million strong worldwide Anglican Communion which is still by law established, and though this has often been questioned as an archaic privilege in an increasingly plural age, there has hitherto been little political enthusiasm to pursue disestablishment. Once the dust has settled on the Church’s embarrassment at being temporarily thwarted by a hard-line minority over women bishops, it remains to be seen whether anything different will happen this time.

The Church itself has remained fiercely protective of what it sees as its solidifying, pastoral role in society. It argues that it can act as a reminder that there is a higher authority than politicking to which public life needs to be held to account, that an Established church can usefully reflect the concerns of religion and morality more widely in a mixed-belief society, and that its significant voluntary contribution to civic society and an expanding role in education under governments of all stripes merit continuing recognition within the country’s unwritten constitutional settlement. This remains the case, establishment’s supporters argue, in spite of the falling numbers and financial challenges that have afflicted the Church in recent years, which means that around a million people (out of a population of 50 million) consistently attend its weekly services.

Scepticism is growing, however, and has reached a new peak this past week.

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In the fallout [over the recent vote on Women Bishops], the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, in an interview with this newspaper, urged Justin Welby, the incoming archbishop, to push through reform regardless, and there were mutterings in the Shadow Cabinet of changing the law so the Church would no longer be immune to charges of sexual discrimination. Hitchiner, though, “shocked” and “sad” as she was, and critical as she is of the overrepresentation in General Synod of people “on the more conservative end of the spectrum”, and the disproportionate amount of airtime they were given “to go back to discussions that were being held 20 years ago about why they felt uncomfortable with the idea of women priests”, says that she is wary of tampering with the system: “I think we stuck to the system and nothing went wrong. That’s the most frustrating thing. I would be happier in the long run without changing the system, without making special arrangements.”

The appointment of women bishops is, she thinks, an “unstoppable train. It is bound to happen.” She feels torn, she says. “As a feminist I believe that women shouldn’t be held back from anything. Women have worked very hard, whether they’re religious or not, to make sure that is the case. But having said that, I also think that if the Church is dictated to by society or the State it ceases to be a church.”

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When the Church of England scuttled plans to allow women bishops on Nov. 20, incoming Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby called it “a very grim day for women and their supporters.”

Now, that grim day is turning into a church-state nightmare for Britain’s established church.

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The key political and constitutional problem is that, although the Church of England now behaves largely as if it is a voluntary society, it remains nonetheless part of the state. The Queen as head of state is ”˜Supreme Governor’ of the Church, must be in communion with it, holds the title Fidei Defensor and ”“ nominally ”“ appoints its senior clergy. The Archbishop crowns and anoints the new sovereign, and the Church conducts important public ceremonies and rituals effectively in relation to the UK as a whole. The Church’s courts remain courts of the land, although they lost their public law jurisdictions in the 1850s. Twenty-six bishops continue to sit in the House of Lords ”“ each nowadays actually appointed by a private, unaccountable committee of the Church itself.

These are high matters and could be addressed again by Parliament. However, whatever the degree of change made, none could procure the appointment of female bishops unless Parliament legislated directly to that end. In other words, disestablishment could not by itself resolve the particular question of female bishops. On the other hand, what disestablishment could do would be ”“ a very different matter ”“ to permit the state and Parliament to wash its hands of Church of England affairs altogether.

Since nothing so far suggests that Parliament contemplates such a rupture, it follows that the Church must be allowed to deal with the present crisis itself. Whether in doing so it strengthens the case for a radical review of remaining church/state ties is another question.

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I propose disestablishment because I want Christianity to flourish in England, and renew itself, and the best way to do this is through a free market ”“ but when you have a powerful state tied to a weak church, you get a statist church pushing a statist agenda. See how Anglican (and Catholic) charities, subsidised by the state, increasingly bury any Christian identity they have in favour of the state’s ideology of “equality and diversity”. The Big Society, as its heart, was an attempt to push the state out of those areas in which it has no real business, such as the charitable, volunteering and caring sectors. The churches should be leaping at this opportunity.

So here’s a possible solution. The Church of England is disestablished, and becomes just another independent church. The government passes a law that no religious building can change function, while taxpayers stop funding church maintenance through groups like English Heritage (which costs £15 million a year). Therefore if a congregation feels that they are sick of Canterbury and want to break off to join a breakaway liberal or evangelical or Anglo-Catholic church they can do so, so long as they can raise the money to buy the building, which since it cannot change function and costs a lot of money to maintain is not much.

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The ex-communicated Anglican Bishop, Nolbert Kunonga, has lost the latest round in his controversial campaign to take over Anglican Church properties from the main church (CPCA).

The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed five appeals that had been lodged by the Kunonga faction, as well as two others launched by his Manicaland counterpart and supporter, Bishop Elson Jakazi.

The appeals were struck off the court’s register after Kunonga’s lawyers made a u-turn and claimed he was still the CPCA’s legitimate Bishop of Harare. This is despite the fact that Kunonga formed his own Church Province of Zimbabwe and appointed himself Bishop of Harare.

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Public school students are largely free to exercise their faith on campus and on the field. A player’s personal prayer in the locker room or on the bench is protected by the First Amendment.

The challenges to prayer arise when school employees and resources are involved. A high school football coach can’t lead his team in prayers. Yet a patchwork of inconsistent court decisions boils down to this: Public universities are free to hold prayers before football games as long as they only cite God and do not mention Jesus. A specific nod to Christianity would be viewed as supporting one faith over others. The theory is that a general nod to a deity serves a non-religious purpose, giving fans a moment to reflect, while not advancing a particular faith.

Public high schools, on the other hand, face greater restrictions

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A proposed amendment to the state Constitution that supporters say would protect Missourians’ right to pray in public will pass by a mammoth margin if numbers from a Post-Dispatch poll hold until Aug. 7.

That’s when the so-called “right to pray” ballot measure ”” known as Amendment 2 ”” will go before voters.

The measure’s champions say it better defines Missourians’ First Amendment rights and will help to protect the state’s Christians, about 80 percent of the population, who they say are under siege in the public square.

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How much money does the U.S. government forgo by not taxing religious institutions? According to a University of Tampa professor, perhaps as much as $71 billion a year.

Ryan Cragun, an assistant professor of sociology, and two students examined U.S. tax laws to estimate the total cost of tax exemptions for religious institutions ”” on property, donations, business enterprises, capital gains and “parsonage allowances,” which permit clergy to deduct housing costs….

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The Rev. Tom Eklo of Richfield’s St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, after voicing his opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota, went even further recently, saying he’d like to get out of the marriage business altogether.

“I don’t think clergy should be doing marriages,” he said. “We’re basically puppets of the state in that regard.”

According to Eklo the state is responsible for marrying individuals””and because marriage is thus a civil, rather than religious contract””religious organizations, of any denomination, should not be tasked with performing marriages.

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The Church of England faces its biggest rupture with the State in 500 years under government plans to legalise gay marriage.

Senior church sources warned that if the legislation goes ahead as proposed, the only way forward will be to cut an important tie between Church and State.

Divorcing the Church from its role as religious registrar for the State would not amount to total disestablishment, but it would be a significant step in that direction and would generate enormous passion and anguish from the pews upwards.

Read it all (requires subscription) and there are other articles there (as of this posting the Independent, the Guardian, the Press Assocation, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph). Note that you may also find a picture of the front page of tomorrow’s [London] Times there.

Although they have rented it out to a restaurant for the past five years, the owners of one building in Aspe have never paid property tax. Nor have they ever paid tax on the apartments that house two of their employees. But that may be about to change. Last week, the city’s government voted to partially rescind the exemption that the Catholic Church, landlord of those three properties and another eight more in town, has long enjoyed. And thanks to the crisis that threatens to upend Spain’s economy, it’s not the only place demanding change.

Three different laws, including a 1979 agreement with the Vatican, exempt the Catholic Church from paying property tax in Spain. The same provision holds for other recognized religions and non-profit organizations like the Red Cross, yet because Catholicism is the dominant religion in Spain, and because the Church’s holdings there are so vast (España Laica, a pro-secularism group, estimates that were it not for the exemption, the church would annually owe 2.5 to 3 billion euros in property taxes), critics have long argued that the arrangement is part of the preferential treatment granted the Catholic Church. It’s only now, however, with austerity measures bearing down and a European bailout looming, that anyone has thought to put that criticism into action. Economic pressure, in other words, may well accomplish what 33 years of democracy have not.

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Major steps toward the dis-establishment of Norway’s state church, the (Lutheran) Church of Norway, were passed by the government on March 16 in its weekly session with King Harald V.
Expected to be adopted by the Parliament (Storting) in May or June this year, the proposals will make changes in the country’s constitution as well as in other church legislation, the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs announced.

“I hope we have now prepared a good basis for the Church of Norway to be an open and inclusive national church, also in a multicultural and multi-religious setting,” Minister Rigmor Aasrud (Labour Party), said in a news release.

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