Care with historical facts

Sir, The writer of your leader (4 September) needs to be rather more careful with historical facts and should marshal his arguments rather better than he has managed to do in his ignorant and pathetic rant this week.

For a start the heliocentric view of the universe advocated by the Church in the 15th/16th century was not a passing fad but has its origins in Aristotle. To suggest that the Church of that period was hitching itself to some passing fad is just ignorant. Galileo was jailed for contradicting Church teaching of what it considered to be ‘true’. That should be a warning to you and all Church people who believe that only they hold the ‘truth’.

Secondly, has you writer not read the Kinsey report? Has he/she no awareness of what the initials LGBTI stand for? What evidence is there to justify the assertion that both Stonewall and the Church of England deny the inconvenient truth being that sexuality is complex and multi-faceted, or ‘fluid’, to use the increasingly favoured term.

In fact it is ‘Christians’ like yourselves who deny the full spectrum of sexual orientation in your quest for the black and white in a world of varying shades of grey. You cling to the Genesis texts of binary male and female. You deny the equality of women with your spurious appeals to Pauline texts. Many of you deny the possibility of women priests because of false teaching about ‘headship’. You deny the legitimate and God-given affections between people of the same sex because it upsets your simplistic notions of complementarity.

Furthermore, the validity of any argument is undermined by the meanness of the writer and the use of language deliberately designed to demean and undermine. By using a phrase like the government’s ‘diktat’ you are deliberately echoing fascist sentiments. And who are the ‘managers of the Church of England’? I thought that we are an Episcopally-led church, synodically governed. Perhaps if the Church of England was ‘managed’ it might do better in the real world.

The plain truth is that you are clutching at straws and this leader only undermines your position more fully. Christians who believe this sort of tosh have lost the argument; Christians who deny the validity and reality of same-sex relationships before God are digging a hole for themselves. The church has always compromised with the society in which it finds itself. To deny that is to deny history. To deny that is to make the Church irrelevant, to fatally compromise its mission and to render it irrelevant to today. Most Christians will in the end accept this. Those who don’t will end up as an irrelevant and decidedly odd exclusive sect.

Richard Ashby,

Emsworth