Welcome to the Lesbian & Gay Christian Movement

All the world's major religions are faced with having to come to terms with a modern understanding of homosexuality. The place of gay and lesbian people in the life of the Church is currently Christianity's most divisive issue. Confronting homophobia is its greatest challenge. The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement is proclaiming a basic Christian truth. It is working for the very love and freedom that Christ brings to his people through his life, death and resurrection. LGCM is working for love, for peace, for justice, and for the promotion of the Christian faith especially within the LGBT community.
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  1. Equal in Love?

    23 November 2011

    On Tuesday 2nd November 2010 our Chief Executive Sharon Ferguson went with her partner to Greenwich Registry Office to apply for a marriage licence. An act so un-newsworthy and commonplace that it should barely need mentioning (other than to offer congratulations to the happy couple who would be shortly announcing the date of their wedding). But Sharon and her partner Franka Strietzel were refused the licence. Not because anyone in Greenwich doubted the genuineness of their relationship but simply because the law doesn’t allow them to apply for a marriage licence. As a same-gender couple they could have applied for a civil partnership but they cannot legally get married. It is this simple and clear-cut example of inequality that led Sharon and Franka a few months ago to decide to challenge the law. After discussions with others it was agreed that they would be the first of four same-gender couples to apply for a marriage licence and thus begin a process which they feel confident will eventually cause a change in this major piece of unequal legislation. At the same time four heterosexual couples agreed to apply for civil partnerships, also currently unavailable to them, in order to further emphasise the inequalities that still exist. And so the Equal Love Campaign was born (see sidebar for more information). In the following pages Sharon explains the reasons for her and Franka’s decision and her personal belief in marriage as something she had always hoped for.

    How did the Equal Love Campaign come about?

    About a year ago I was invited to speak at a conference on marriage equality being organised by the Unitarian Church in Stoke Newington. This Church had taken the radical step to refuse to conduct weddings at their church until they could conduct them for all couples regardless of sexual orientation. At this conference, Peter Tatchell and Professor Robert Wintemute were also speaking. During a panel discussion the idea came up that the law should be challenged. I had already explained that I would not personally enter into a civil partnership and so I was asked if I’d be prepared to challenge the law with my partner.

    From this, Peter, Robert and I started talking about the possibility of taking action. It is particularly pertinent that the campaign started when it did as Guy Bentham, who organised the conference, died shortly before the first application was made.

    Why is marriage equality so important to you?

    There are two main reasons: the first is a professional one. LGCM has a long history of campaigning for marriage equality and although it was decided five years ago to accept the introduction of civil partnerships, as the protection being offered was too great to risk, the desire for full equality has never gone away. Fighting for equality is what underpins all the work of LGCM and the current system of two institutions is clearly segregation.

    Personally, I want to get married. Maybe I’m a traditionalist at heart or unconsciously seeking conventionalism, but for me, marriage combines the legal requirement of our society for recognition of my relationship alongside the spiritual affirmation. I don’t separate my life into secular and spiritual, God is integral to everything I do, consequently, when it comes to the biggest commitment of my life, I don’t want to split that celebration.

    So, does that mean you see civil partnerships as a second class system?

    Not in the slightest! I hope that couples who do not want to get married will continue to enter into civil partnerships and I will continue to wholeheartedly bless those commitments. My argument is about the discrimination that having a dual system that excludes on the basis of sexual orientation brings about. Civil partnerships and marriage are almost identical in the rights and benefits they bestow. It is because of this that the discrimination is highlighted. We are segregated according to the gender of the person we love. If we love someone of the same gender we are not allowed a marriage and if we love someone of the opposite gender we are not allowed a civil partnership. The only purpose for introducing a separate identical system is to discriminate —what other reason can there be?

    Why are you also campaigning for civil partnerships for straight couples?

    Basically for the reasons already outlined. Equality. I believe that in God’s eyes we are all equal and therefore entitled to be treated equally. The current law denies gay and lesbian couples the right to marriage but equally it denies the right for straight couples to have a civil partnership. There are many people who do not agree with marriage because of its basis in patriarchalism. For those couples, civil partnerships are an ideal way to register their commitment to each other. On the same note, there are couples who dislike the heteronormativity of marriage and so again a civil partnership would be more appropriate. The bottom line is that we should all have the choice regardless of sexual orientation.

    Stonewall didn’t support this campaign initially and still want to keep civil partnerships purely for gay and lesbian couples. What do you feel about that?

    My understanding is that Stonewall wanted to establish if their supporters wanted them to devote their resources to this campaign given the level of protection already afforded through civil partnerships. Consequently, I asked the members of LGCM to let Stonewall know if this was an important issue for them. I’m really pleased that they are now supporting the action as I feel it’s important that we all work together.

    I appreciate that Stonewall is about fighting for equality for lesbian, gay and bisexual people and not for the rights of the heterosexual majority however, to keep civil partnerships only for gay and lesbian couples is not equality as then we would not be treated the same. Why should we have access to an extra system that straight couples don’t? Especially when some straight couples have the same or similar issues with the institution of marriage.

    How is the campaign going?

    The campaign started on 2nd November 2010 when my partner, Franka and I, applied for a marriage license and were refused on the grounds that we are both female. There are three other same gendered couples who are applying for a marriage license and there are also four different gendered couples applying for a civil partnership license. It is expected that we will all be refused as we don’t comply with the gender requirement.

    On 21st December 2010, the fifth anniversary of the introduction of civil partnerships, there will be a conference at which we will launch our legal challenge.

    It is likely to be a long campaign but it is an issue that I strongly feel needs fighting for.

    LGCM is not like other human rights groups in that it is concerned with equality in the religious domain. How does fighting for ’civil’ marriage fit into this?

    We have a system in the UK that confuses civil and religious marriage. A religious marriage is only legal if all the civil components have been satisfied, i.e. a license has been issued and a person authorised by the state has witnessed that acceptable vows have been made and both parties have signed the register. The license has to be supplied by the registry office and an authorised person is either a register officer or a clergy person with a licence to perform marriages.

    In other words, we need the right to have a civil marriage in order to be able to have a religious marriage.

    The main objection to lesbian and gay people having a marriage rather than a civil partnership came from the religious sector because for them marriage is between a man and a woman. Therefore, the right to be able to get married is clearly a religious issue as well as a human rights issue.

    Category: All God's Children Article, Equal Love Campaign


  2. Popes, protests and paedophiles

    by Tony Green

    The following article is by no means uncontroversial and I trust that those taking time to read it will no more blindly accept it than dismiss it out of hand. While LGCM obviously stands against child abuse of any kind, the views expressed here are very much my own. They are offered to help provoke thought, debate and, above all, action. Agreement with everything you read here is somewhat secondary to standing up, speaking out and creating change. The background to my concerns around this issue go back far longer than any of the recent scandals among Roman Catholic priests. It is true however that the Protest the Pope campaign acted as a catalyst for this particular piece of writing…

    Unsurprisingly the Papal protests and the outrage about child sex abuse among priests (and the cover-up) have provided new impetus for those of us horrified by those adults who do harm to children. But – and this is not intended to minimise the crimes within the Roman Catholic Church – my own research backs up what I have long suspected: abuse by priests is such a minute part of the problem it is, in cold statistical terms, negligible.

    Within the UK only 1% of all sexual abuse is at the hands of those in positions of authority and priests make up just a small part of this group (the one percent figure representing those in authority also includes people like social workers, football coaches, doctors and so on). Teachers however are placed in a separate category —as there are so many of them by comparison. Five percent of sexual abuse is at the hands of teachers. So even if the priests made up the entire 1% of the ’those in authority’ category (which they clearly don’t) parents should be five times more wary of sending their children to school than to church. And if parents have sons they should be even more worried. Boys are more than twice as likely to be abused by their teachers than girls.

    But the shocking truth is that parents are by far the most likely to sexually abuse their children. I had always believed that the biggest perpetrators of sexual abuse in the child’s home are adults other than biological parents, that step-parents (mainly step-fathers) were the main culprits. That’s to say the biological relationship diminished the likelihood of abuse. Or so I thought. Well ponder this… Childline (run by the NSPCC) reports the following: 24% of children contacting them report that they are abused by their fathers and 11% by their mothers. Step-fathers are only responsible for 5% and stepmothers 1%. Put simply, this means that statistically children are much safer with the partners of their mum or dad who have come into the family than with their own birth parents.

    When you break this down along gender lines it makes even more disturbing reading. The abuse of girls is perpetrated 27% of the time by their fathers and 4% by their mothers. I imagine that most would have expected this disparity between the proportion of abusive mothers and fathers. But when it comes to boys no such difference exists. Twenty percent of sexually abused boys are violated by their fathers and 20% by their mothers. These are the statistics at the heart of the real cover-up going on in our society. Children are not safe in the home and it’s their biological parents who are the most common culprits. (This not only requires an answer from secularists who blame religion for everything, it somewhat demands an answer from the Christian Institute and others on the Right who seek to deify the family.)

    But the shocks don’t stop here, because the biggest single category of perpetrator of child sexual abuse is —other children. Forty percent of children who are sexually abused name other children as their abusers. (Children here includes teenagers under 18, both victims and abusers.)

    If that doesn’t give pause for thought nothing will.

    I’m going to focus on boys here, not because the abuse of girls is less serious (obviously not), but because the majority of victims of the priests have been boys, (mostly teenagers). Estimates based on research both here and in the United States suggest that 1 in 6 boys has been sexually abused at some point. This is a shocking figure. My last permanent teaching job was in a boys’ high school. This means that in each of the classes I taught, averaging thirty pupils, 5 boys had been sexually abused.

    Most schools are of course co-educational. To keep the maths easy to digest (even if the truth cannot be so easily stomached) let’s imagine a co-educational comprehensive school of around 1200 pupils. This is a fairly typical size. Let’s also assume the pupil population is divided equally between boys and girls (unlikely in fact).

    During the course of any one school day 1200 adolescents will pass through the doors of numerous classrooms. Yet every single day 100 of the 600 boys and a greater number of the 600 girls will be carrying the knowledge and trauma that they have been sexually violated at some point; some many times over and many perhaps experiencing the abuse in the present. Many will be dealing with this alone, their shame and fear trapping them in secrecy and collusion with their abusers.

    Let’s see how the statistics break down. Remember we’re focusing on the boys only. Based on the calls Childline receive, of the 100 boys who will have been abused, 5 will have been at the hands of their step-father, and 20 by their father. Another 20 will have been violated by their mother. Forty will have been sexually assaulted, or interfered with against their will, by their own peers. Somewhat less than one boy will have been abused by a priest or similar minister of religion.

    Organisers of the Protest the Pope march in London on Saturday 18 September estimate that 20,000 people took part. Such estimates are notoriously problematic but we’ll stick with their own figures for now. If we say that 10,000 were men and boys (again to keep things simple), then 1,667 of these have been sexually abused at some point as children. Seventeen of these were abused by those in authority. Eighty three were abused by teachers, 666 by parents (now there’s a number you couldn’t make up) and another 666 by other children/young people. Some on the march were still under 18 and may still be being abused. There was, therefore, in that crowd a lot of pain and anguish and deeply suppressed anger. Most of it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Roman Catholic Church. Based on NSPCC statistics approximately 12 of those taking part in the Protest the Pope march will have been convicted child sex offenders themselves. The number who will have committed sexual crimes against children and who haven’t been found out or convicted will have been considerably higher.

    The banner proclaiming ’All religion is child abuse’ that one protester held (I am not suggesting he did so with official approval) is not only deeply offensive to those whose faith has motivated them to help the most vulnerable in society, it is also so far from the truth that it would be laughable if the whole subject wasn’t so serious. There is a deep crisis here that is spread far more widely that the Catholic Church (or any other religious institution).

    The priest child sex scandals matter a very great deal. Crimes —especially crimes against children – perpetrated and then hidden away must be exposed and brought to justice. Jesus of Nazareth only once came close to advocating the death penalty (if you take his words literally) and that was in reference to those who do harm to children (Matthew 18:6, Luke 17:2). If the Roman Catholic Church took the words of Christ seriously they might hesitate less about handing over the abusers to the police. In doing so they would in fact be letting them off lightly.

    The focus of my concern though is the children, not the Church. The motivation of many of the protesters seemed to be their hatred for all things religious. Given that clerical involvement in child sex abuse scandals is just the tip of the iceberg, it would make sense on the part of those who have protested most loudly that they follow this through consistently and broaden the scope of their concerns. They can do this by addressing what is going on in our society at large – where it is those in the family home who are the most likely to sexually abuse children, along with those children’s peers.

    Ours is a remarkably non-religious society in terms of personal belief and practice so the notion that a greater secularisation of society would help us is simply wrong. Something is going on at a much wider and deeper level and as I’ve said it is this which is the true scandal. Broadening their focus and working to eradicate child abuse wherever it is found would be a strong indication of the genuineness of the protesters’ anger about such abuse.

    I explained to one of the organisers prior to the protest why I wouldn’t be marching. There were a few reasons but I highlighted the fact that I felt there were a mish-mash of grievances all being given equal prominence rather than a focus on any particular issue. Of course if your motive and intention is to simply rubbish all religion (in particular Catholic religion), to read the rap sheet, to declare the Church guilty as charged and then to go about punishing it, then a conglomeration of issues is acceptable. But if this isn’t your motive you need to work out what it is you’re protesting about. It is true that all public protests bring together all sorts with a variety of agendas. But it seemed to me that even among all the official publicity no one quite knew which issue, or cluster of related issues, they ought to address most.

    As far as I’m concerned the one issue that urgently needs to be addressed is the child abuse scandal. I say this as a gay man who is deeply distressed at all religion-based homophobia and has no wish to defend the Catholic hierarchy in particular in this respect. I say it as one who cannot bear to think about the suffering of millions in Africa due to the scourge of AIDS which most would agree has been made many times worse by the Catholic Church’s historic position on condoms. So why do I say it? Why is it that child abuse is the one issue I feel should have a light shined on it at this time? It is simply for the reasons I have already given. Child abuse is endemic in our society, and the scapegoating of religion and particularly the Catholic Church, is not only unjust and unfair but it is allowing abusers to go under the radar. We are deflecting our attention away from where it should be. We need to ask what exactly is it that makes so many adults treat like trash the most vulnerable in our society? (And of course we can extend this discussion to the elderly and other groups who have a right to expect to be treated with dignity, love and compassion.)

    I believe most of the protesters would in principle agree with me. It was, after all, the priest abuse scandal that led to such a massive groundswell of negative opinion and raw anger against the Church. I don’t wish to suggest that most haven’t been genuine in their shock and disgust, but assuming, as I do, such sincerity it is incumbent upon us all —whatever our sexuality, gender, religion or lack of religious commitment —to seek change and not just people to blame.

    Even those most opposed to organised religion ought to see that without this desire for change, the notion that a greater secularisation of society would help us is, at best, an irrelevance.

    Category: All God's Children Article


  3. Death by Doctrinal Correctness

    Simenon Honoré brings us a challenging and highly thought-provoking approach to ’good doctrine’.

    “What our Lord has made me do and has commanded and may yet command, I shall not fail to do for the sake of any man alive, and should the Church wish that I do something against the commandment that was given me by God, I would not do it for anything.” Joan of Arc, 1431

    Political correctness’ has never had a very good press. It is often taken to mean we can only use the ’right’ terms to describe different kinds of people, tiptoe round the sensibilities of minority groups and end up afraid to express any opinion lest it offend. More positively some see it as using language with awareness and being sensitive to the mores of various cultures. Either way it has not, as far as I know, killed anyone or led to mass imprisonment, torture or wholesale suppression of knowledge.

    Which is more than can be said for ’doctrinal correctness’ —the idea that we must have the ’right’ beliefs to meet with the approval of our Church and gain heavenly salvation. And not only that: for much of Christianity’s history, ’doctrinal correctness’ was essential to avoid the Inquisition or some other form of ’godly’ correction. Failure to follow the articles of faith as laid down by the Church authorities could literally mean death.

    But there is another kind of death that can flow from pursuing doctrinal correctness. More subtle, but just as pernicious, is the spiritual straitjacket that the followers of Christ are put in by the emphasis on what we believe rather than what we bring to our relationship with God in our lives. Sincerity, love, creativity, thought and honesty are the building blocks of our spiritual development. Do these really count for less compared to, say, having the ’correct’ theological position on the Doctrine of the Trinity? Am I really a better or worse person for believing or disbelieving in the Virgin Birth?

    We in the LGBT community, who have historically fallen foul of traditional Church doctrines, have the opportunity not just to question the particular doctrines used against us but the very idea of doctrine as the measure of spiritual worth. So let’s start with a basic question. Does doctrine really matter? When Jesus first met Peter and Andrew fishing on the shores of Galilee, Matthew’s Gospel tells us:
    “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him.

    They responded immediately, heart and soul, to their calling —not with some prolonged theological questioning. As we respond to Christ’s calling it is surely the intention in our hearts that God hears not the theological nonsense in our heads. For the only person in the universe who knows the absolute truth is God. So why has so much ink – and worse, so much blood – been spilled over matters no one can ever be truly sure about?

    Doctrine is not the same as belief. At any given moment, we all believe certain things. We also know from experience that our ideas may develop, deepen, or even change, possibly completely. Keeping an open mind is all part of our spiritual growth. But if we believe our beliefs represent the absolute unchanging truth then our minds start to close and we become dogmatic. But this is precisely the nature of doctrine —a fixed set of beliefs with any possibility of change in the hands of an ecclesiastical hierarchy.

    For doctrine has become a form of control based on the age old supposition that the Church is the shepherd and we apparently are the weak-minded sheep that must be guarded from the wolves of heresy. Historically the Church authorities have maintained that a uniform doctrine was necessary to bring order to the ’chaos’ in the early years of Christianity with different communities practising and believing different things. What sort of ’chaos’ might this be? We need look no further than the main street in any town. Here people go in and out of dozens of shops, each one buying different things, even changing their minds about what they want. You might want to describe this as ’chaos’ but people seem go about their business without blood being spilled. But a free market in ideas has traditionally found little favour in mainstream Christianity as it challenges the Church’s claim to have the monopoly of spiritual truth.

    The irrelevance of doctrine to spirituality was illustrated to me when I was working on the night shift in a warehouse. By the time we finished the buses had stopped running and I was grateful for a lift from one of my colleagues. Amongst the staff were Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and agnostics. Over a period of time I noticed some people were more generous in giving their colleagues lifts than others.

    There might be any number of reasons for this but one thing it had little connection with was their religion. In other words it’s how people actually live their lives, the compassion for their fellow humans, that really counts – not the nature of some abstract belief system. Interestingly the guy who went furthest out his way to give me a lift home – driving three miles in the opposite direction to where he lived – was an agnostic.

    There are yet deeper problems with doctrine. By its very nature doctrine is a fixed thought form through which everything and everyone is seen. As such it can hinder us from being fully open to the Spirit in three key areas – humanity, truth and life itself:

    Doctrine can separate us from our humanity, not only in the sense of our fellow human beings, but also in the sense of our humanity – compassion, decency, mercy. We risk no longer seeing people as people but as labels like “Heretics” or even “Enemies of Christ”. History has shown too many times the horrors that have been committed in the name of God.

    Doctrine can obscure truth. All of creation is there for us to learn from, but we need an open mind. If the truth of what we encounter has to be sieved through our doctrinal perspective, it can blinker our quest because we reject inconvenient truths.

    Doctrine can divide us from life. By creating a doctrinal veil through which life is experienced, it can hinder us from embracing it fully. We can create a prison for ourselves, terrified of being really alive in case we wander from the “correct” doctrinal position.

    Because doctrine can separate us from humanity, from truth and from life it can come between us and God, for they are all manifestations of the Divine.

    To experience our Creator as fully as we are able, we need to be open in mind and heart, body and soul, unhampered by artificial theological constraints.

    Our spirits need not be crushed under the dead weight of centuries of Church dogma. We are free to stand on our own spiritual feet, to explore and experience our relationship with our Creator for ourselves.

    Category: All God's Children Article