Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Bryant and Andrew Selous(5 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Andrew Selous
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his interest in this important area. I can tell him that the commissioners have had meetings with Departments and with the children’s commissioner to work alongside Government to strengthen family relationships, parenting and marriage. The Church itself wants to play a more active role in this crucial area and is producing new resources to help parishes do so. I am sure he will know that, in his own constituency, St Andrew’s Church is already exemplifying much of this good work under the excellent leadership of the Reverend Tom Houston, who trained as a youth worker prior to ordination.
Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Same-sex couples are able to show love and be a good family as well, so why will the Church of England not recognise same-sex marriage?
Andrew Selous
The hon. Member will know that this is an issue with which the General Synod continues to be involved through the living in love and faith process. We are working through these issues and the Church will have heard very clearly what he has said, and I can assure him that that work is being taken forward.
Equal Marriage: Church of England
Debate between Chris Bryant and Andrew SelousUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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Andrew Selous
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I believe that I can reassure him. As I said earlier, the new pastoral guidance will take account of the major change that the Church of England made last week. That guidance will be put together at pace by a group of bishops and a wider group with a diverse range of lived experience on these issues. On the changes that my hon. Friend seeks, I think I am able to say to him that he and others who are concerned will be pleased about the direction that this new pastoral guidance will go in.
Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
There is an awful lot of pain. Imagine being a church warden. You turn up maybe every day of the week to open the church before the priest gets there to take the 8 o’clock service. On Sundays, you turn up a couple of hours beforehand to make sure the church is warm. You clean and iron the vestments, you make sure the church is prepared, and you count the collection at the end of the service. And you have fallen in love with somebody of your own sex. The place that you have devoted your life to—and your God—is that church, and that is the place you cannot get married. That is terribly, terribly painful.
I think that there is still a cruelty in what the bishops have brought forward. There is a sort of hypocrisy. I know that they are trying to square everything off, but in the end there is a hypocrisy that we will bless the individuals but not the relationship. You can have a sort of blessing of your relationship—a celebration—but you cannot be married; you cannot refer to the other person as your husband. Imagine being a priest and wanting to be able to marry your church warden to the person they love. Is there any biblical teaching that says this is wrong? Is there any, really? Did Jesus say a single word about same-sex relationships or marriage? I do not think he did. He said a great deal about love—God of love. St Paul said that, in Christ, there was neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, and I think he would probably also have said, neither gay nor straight.
Andrew Selous
The whole House will have been deeply moved by what the hon. Gentleman has said. I get his passion and strength of feeling on the issue. I do not know whether he had a chance to see the Church of England press conference last Friday. The Archbishop of York was deeply moved by what the Church of England did last week, as in fact was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who mentioned a former member of his congregation who was gay and who later took his own life. What a terrible tragedy that was for the Archbishop of Canterbury and for many, many others.
In a sense, the Church of England—if it will forgive me for saying this—has almost managed to upset absolutely everyone because these proposals clearly do not go far enough for some. I just ask the House to understand that there are some who are deeply grieving and troubled because they believe that the proposals have gone too far. The hon. Gentleman is right: we read the same Bible. It is slightly strange, Madam Deputy Speaker, I do not even have a degree in theology and here I am, the only person in the whole Parliament who speaks for the Church of England. But I study the Bible, like the hon. Gentleman, and I know that good and true people can come to different conclusions about it. He will know that and respect that. I thank him for his gracious and very moving words.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Bryant and Andrew Selous(4 years ago)
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Andrew Selous
Absolutely. My hon. Friend raises a really important point. I am grateful to him for alerting the House to Tearfund’s research, which found that one in four people in the UK has listened to or watched a religious service over the lockdown, and I am particularly pleased to learn of the initiatives in the two local churches that he mentioned. He will be pleased to know that the diocese of London, for example, has led large outdoor services, and in the diocese of Norwich, in a large-scale drive-in service, hymns and preaching were beamed directly to car radios through a dedicated FM channel.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Debate between Chris Bryant and Andrew Selous
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
I rise in support of new clause 5, which says that
“no person should suffer any detriment in respect of the holding or the reasonable expression”
of a belief in marriage as that between a man and woman.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) has reminded the House of the hatred, abuse, aggression and, indeed, the discrimination that she and others have suffered. That was wrong, so it is with humility that I ask her to bear in mind that others who take a contrary view to hers on the Bill may also find themselves subject to discrimination.
The question is this: should there be space in public life for people who hold to the current definition of marriage? That is not a theoretical question. The case of Adrian Smith has already been discussed. I will not go through it again, because time is short, but I remind hon. Members that he was a dedicated local authority housing officer who then worked for a housing association and was very well thought of. He served everyone, regardless of their situation, but he lost his job because of private remarks on his private Facebook page, and he is now doing charitable work in Africa because his job was taken away from him. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) said in her excellent contribution that she hoped that people will be dealt with in an inclusive and tolerant way. I say to her, with great respect, that I hope she would want such inclusiveness and tolerance to be given to people such as Adrian Smith, who did not receive it.
I say to colleagues on the Government Benches that unless we get the legislation right, this issue will run and run until 2015 and will keep coming back. I gently remind colleagues on the Opposition Benches that no less a campaigner for homosexual rights than Peter Tatchell supported Adrian Smith. He did not agree with his views, but believed passionately in his ability to state them and thought it wrong that his job was taken away, as was that of Rev. Willie Ross, the chaplain to Strathclyde police. It is such things that we must guard against.
Chris Bryant
I want to start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes). Although I disagree with him passionately on every element of the Bill, I none the less enjoyed sitting on a panel with him at a school in his constituency to tackle the problem of homophobic bullying in the area. I pay tribute to the work that he has done on that issue.
I understand that many people of religion disagree fundamentally with every element of the Bill. I hope that one day they will be amazed that they ever held those views. Some have said that the Church used to support slavery and that it no longer does. A better analogy might be the Church’s attitude to the role of women and, for that matter, women in marriage 100 years ago, compared with its views today. For those who have a strong religious bent, I note that the Church of Scotland has voted today to allow homosexual clergy. I think that Churches will change and I do not want to lock them in so many ways that they are not able to do so.
I and my hon. Friends believe that equality under the law is a vital principle. The Equality Act 2010 is a subtle and intelligent piece of drafting which ensures that people’s religious belief is as protected as their sexual orientation. I worry about some of the new clauses and amendments before us, because they would upset that balance.
Hon. Members have referred to the chilling effect of what they call “political correctness” and of this kind of legislation. I say simply that if they look around the world and listen to the experiences of many gay and lesbian children in schools, they will see that hateful speech is alive and well. That is why a gay or lesbian child is six times more likely to commit suicide than a heterosexual child. We need to take seriously the fact that the language that people use merely because they oppose same-sex marriage adds to that sense of hatred and unpleasantness. To make the point, one has only to mention the names of Stuart Walker, who was burned to death only a few years ago for being gay, and Jody Dobrowski, who was murdered not far from this House.
I want to deal with the new clauses and amendments. New clause 1, to which many hon. Members have referred, is fundamentally ill-conceived. I do not doubt that some people are concerned about what teachers will be able to teach in schools. However, some of the understandings of teaching that I have heard this afternoon are completely misplaced. The hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), belted knight that he is, elided preaching and teaching. My fundamental point is that not much teaching should be preaching. That is the experience in every religious school in this country. Such schools want people to embrace the central understanding of every religion, which is that conscience trumps everything else. If that is the case, why would they want people to adhere to a line or to be indoctrinated? They would not. They want people to learn how to understand the facts and the world in which they live so that they can make good decisions for themselves.
The Education Act 1996 states very clearly:
“The Secretary of State must issue guidance designed to secure that when sex education is given to registered pupils at maintained schools…they learn the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and the bringing up of children”.
I do not think that anybody disagrees with that. Secondly—and this is vital to the point that some hon. Members have made—it states that pupils must be
“protected from teaching and materials which are inappropriate having regard to the age and the religious and cultural background of the pupils concerned.”
Therefore, the Act already embodies precisely what new clause 1 seeks to achieve.
Where new clause 1 fails is that it undermines the next bit of the Act, which states:
“In discharging their functions under subsection (1) governing bodies and head teachers must have regard to the Secretary of State’s guidance.”
The new clause would make the Secretary of State’s guidance completely and utterly irrelevant.
Chris Bryant
I will not give way to the hon. Lady if she does not mind. I would normally be very generous, but there is not much time.
A registrar is there solely to register that which is lawful. They are paid by all taxpayers, not just by some taxpayers. If Parliament decides that same-sex marriages are lawful, how can it be right for somebody to be rejected? Why do we not introduce a clause that says that sextons, who are public employees, can refuse to bury suicides, or that a registrar can refuse to marry a divorcee? Of course we have never done that, because we believe that everybody should be treated equally under the law. How can we say that commercial enterprises, such as bed and breakfasts, cannot discriminate in the provision of goods and services, but that the state can discriminate in the provision of marriage services? I hope that hon. Members will think twice about supporting those new clauses.
Likewise, hon. Members should think twice about supporting new clauses 4, 5 and 6, which would effectively drive a coach and horses through the Equality Act 2010. I say to the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) that there is a fundamental misconception about how the Act works. It does not protect the individual belief within religion; it protects the religion. It is not transubstantiation that is protected, but Catholicism. It is not a belief in the afterlife that is protected, but Christianity. It would be invidious to introduce any special provision that breached that.
Chris Bryant
I will not, I am afraid, because we are very short of time.
I gently suggest to hon. Members that the language that is used in some of the new clauses and amendments comes far too close for the liking of many people to a repeat of section 28. That did damage and we do not want to see it again.
I urge Members not to drive a coach and horses through the equality legislation, which treats everybody equally, regardless of their religion or sexuality.