Religion

DonViejo

(60,536 posts) Sat Apr 5, 2014, 01:20 PM Apr 2014

African Christians will be killed if C of E accepts gay marriage, says Justin Welby

Archbishop says he has seen mass grave of Christians killed by neighbours who said they feared being 'made to become gay'

Andrew Brown
theguardian.com, Friday 4 April 2014 07.33 EDT

African Christians will be killed if the Church of England accepts gay marriage, the archbishop of Canterbury has suggested. Speaking on an LBC phone in, Justin Welby said he had stood by a mass grave in Nigeria of 330 Christians who had been massacred by neighbours who had justified the atrocity by saying: "If we leave a Christian community here we will all be made to become homosexual and so we will kill all the Christians."

"I have stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who had been attacked because of something that had happened in America. We have to listen to that. We have to be aware of the fact," Welby said. If the Church of England celebrated gay marriages, he added, "the impact of that on Christians far from here, in South Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria and other places would be absolutely catastrophic. Everything we say here goes round the world."

This reasoning has until now been kept private, although both Welby and his predecessor, Rowan Williams, anguished about it in private.

Welby also condemned homophobia in England. "To treat every human being with equal importance and dignity is a fundamental part of being a Christian," he said. Although he continued to uphold what he called the historic position of the church, of "sex only within marriage and marriage only between a man and a woman", he agreed with the presenter, James O'Brien, that it was "completely unacceptable" for the church to condemn homosexual people more than adulterous heterosexual people.

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http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/04/african-christians-church-of-england-gay-marriage-justin-welby

5 replies

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African Christians will be killed if C of E accepts gay marriage, says Justin Welby (Original Post) DonViejo Apr 2014 OP

As an Episcopalian/Anglican I am appalled that he said this. hrmjustin Apr 2014 #1

Reap what you sow. AtheistCrusader Apr 2014 #2

A substantial portion of the blame okasha Apr 2014 #3

For once, Brown's commentary on this is right: muriel_volestrangler Apr 2014 #4

Welby is as worthless a "leader" as Rowan Williams was before him. kwassa Apr 2014 #5

hrmjustin

(71,265 posts)

1. As an Episcopalian/Anglican I am appalled that he said this.

Reply to DonViejo (Original post)

Sat Apr 5, 2014, 01:51 PM

Apr 2014

AtheistCrusader

(33,982 posts)

2. Reap what you sow.

Reply to DonViejo (Original post)

Sat Apr 5, 2014, 02:49 PM

Apr 2014

Even that last line in the last paragraph of the excerpt:

"James O'Brien, that it was "completely unacceptable" for the church to condemn homosexual people more than adulterous heterosexual people"

I think one might safely assume that means they condemn it about the same, as a sin. That kind of homophobia is the sort of thing that led to the primary problem he cited in the beginning. You define something as a sin, and people start worrying about it, isolating it, pushing it away, mistreating it, mistrusting it.

As long as these people call it a sin AT ALL, I call them bigots. And playing social games/engineering with bigoted ideas has potential consequences, if in the case of the situation illustrated here, where Christians themselves might be mistreated if they start treating gay people as actual equal human beings with rights.

You reap, what you sow.

okasha

(11,573 posts)

3. A substantial portion of the blame

Reply to DonViejo (Original post)

Sat Apr 5, 2014, 04:40 PM

Apr 2014

for the anti-LGBT bigotry and legislation lies with Brownback, Lively and the C-Street "Family." They can't get their homophobic laws passed here, so they've exported their hate to Africa. The underlying question of why Ugandan and Nigerian society seems to be open to this kind of manipulation needs to be explored.

And no--it's not just that they're Christian. The US is statistically if not legally a Christian country, and support for equal marriage and LGBT rights in general is spreading more rapidly than I'd ever dreamed it could.

muriel_volestrangler

(101,361 posts)

4. For once, Brown's commentary on this is right:

Reply to DonViejo (Original post)

Sat Apr 5, 2014, 05:29 PM

Apr 2014

There is a third, general point against moral blackmail, applicable both to Christians and utilitarians: yielding to bullies does nothing to discourage them. It's a dreadful thing to say that the lives of Christians who will die in Africa should be balanced against the rights of LGBT people here. But the equation is worse than that. The lives of LGBT people in Africa are put at risk whenever homophobic arguments are accepted as valid. We're balancing Christians who are massacred for being Christians against gay men burnt alive by Christian lynch mobs in Uganda. Unfortunately, it seems that the lives of LGBT people in Uganda are just as much threatened when foreigners reject homophobic arguments as bigoted.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/apr/05/archbishop-welby-gay-marriage-moral-blackmail

kwassa

(23,340 posts)

5. Welby is as worthless a "leader" as Rowan Williams was before him.

Reply to DonViejo (Original post)

Sat Apr 5, 2014, 09:57 PM

Apr 2014

The moral imperative is to act now, not obfuscate, though that is the Anglican way. This is the time to act and make a statement about gay rights.

Not confronting bigotry encourages the bigots.

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