The Sound of Silence

I hope that this will be my last comment on last week’s gay rights versus religious rights debate in the UK, but I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrow in a very ironical fashion when I read the piece by Giles Fraser, the Vicar of Putney, in today’s Guardian, entitled Atheists: the bigots’ friends.

 

While I grant him the point that many Christians are fully in support of gay rights, it does also seem that most of them have kept pretty quiet about it recently. And then again, there’s the rather telling point that of the 26 Bishops who sit in the House of Lords, only five of them were present in the debate last week, and of them, only one(!) voted against the motion to deny equal rights to gay people. So that leaves four of them who are quite happy to have discrimination continue, and potentially there are a further 21 of them who would agree with them.

 

But then again, perhaps Giles Fraser doesn’t think that the Bishops are representative of the views of many Christians. If so, it’s a peculiar state of affairs indeed. 

 

Update: Ophelia, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, has a little chat with Giles.