Opting Out

Although our visitors to the church on Monday were pretty young, I was aware that talking about weddings nevertheless raises some fraught matters. For all I knew, among those sixty children might have been some who had two mums or dads in their family. So I said that the Church of England only marries people of different sexes, and that's why the service looks the way it does, but people of the same sex can marry each other elsewhere. 

Of course not everyone is happy with children being told this. I can't see, however, that one's moral opinions, regardless of what they might be or where they come from, give one the right to opt out of reality, still less to pretend to one's children that reality is different from what is the case. In this jurisdiction, people of the same sex can marry: it is wrong to shield children from this truth, or for clergy of the Established Church to gloss it over as though it did not exist.

(A friend of mine pointed out that all Germany's Muslim MPs voted in 2017 to support same-sex marriage, which is the case: 'being part of a certain demographic doesn't make you an idiot; being an idiot makes you an idiot', she says reasonably. Although I note that all those MPs come from Turkish backgrounds, and Turkey, until its current leader's efforts, was the most unMuslimish Muslim country in the world, and proud of it).