Thinking Anglicans

Stock Exchange chaplain criticised

Updated again Tuesday afternoon

The chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, Peter Mullen is in trouble.

According to the Evening Standard , in a report by Robert Mendick and Simon Kirby Chaplain: Gay men should have sodomy warning tattoos

The chaplain to the London Stock Exchange is under pressure to quit today after demanding gay men should be forced to have “sodomy” warnings tattooed on their bodies.

The suggestion is contained in a series of comments on the internet blog of the Rev Peter Mullen.

The Bishop of London today branded Mr Mullen’s comments “highly offensive” and Stonewall, the gay rights charity, said he should resign…

…the bishop today also rebuked Mr Mullen for his remarks.

In a statement issued to the Evening Standard, a spokesman said: “While clergy are entitled to their own personal views, we recognise that the content of this text is highly offensive and is in no way reflective of the views of the Diocese of London.”

A source at the Diocese said the chaplain may now face a disciplinary inquiry over his comments. The source said: “These comments are now being looked at internally within the Diocese and he faces disciplinary procedures.”

Other newspapers are following up:

Telegraph Aislinn Simpson Homosexuals should carry warning tattoos, says chaplain

Guardian Riazat Butt Vicar could be disciplined for blog slurs against gays and Muslims

Press Association via the Independent Rector condemned for ‘sodomy’ remarks

BBC Tattoo gay people, priest writes

Andrew Brown has noted this item at Comment is free in A taxi-driver, oops, vicar writes.

Ruth Gledhill has Peter Mullen should have his bottom spanked!

And Times Online finally has a report, Chaplain’s blog calls for homosexuals to be tatooed.

Now, after a day of this, second stories:

Press Association Clergyman apologises over call to tattoo gay people

BBC Priest ‘sorry’ for gay comments

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Martin Reynolds
Martin Reynolds
15 years ago

Poor Peter Mullen, he keeps on saying the most outrageous things, and I had thought that there wasn’t anybody left who paid attention to his obscene ramblings. My own experience warns me that usually only the most repressed of closet gays believe the world is under attack from gay missionaries or are obsessed by anal intercourse and oral sex. I hope nobody sacks him or does anything unnecessary to this fellow – the Stock Exchange now more than ever needs the ludicrous distraction he offers and as Rowan Williams would be keen to remind us – his views are shared… Read more »

BillyD
BillyD
15 years ago

I’m all for free speech. But what you say in public in one venue certainly can reflect from your competence in another area. I’m a teacher. If I were to say publicly that I thought all teenagers should be kept in medically induced comas until the hormones wore off, I might expect it to get back to the Head of my school, and I might expect that my Head to think that my statements impinged on my ability to do my job.

drdanfee
drdanfee
15 years ago

Ah yes, the good Rev. M does us all favors now. His remarks are satirical, he says, and yet quite to the point of an analysis of traditional prejudice belief dynamics and factors involved in these most traditional religious beliefs about queer folks. So he helps make the ongoing point: a whole generation of traditionalistic believers indeed does believe these things, even if they do not always spell them out. Even the good reverend’s own remarks clarify: I do not dislike queer folks, I only wish not to know so much, so often, so clearly – about the different problems… Read more »

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
15 years ago

“is in no way reflective of the views of the Diocese of London.” But they are certainly relfective of the views of a good many dioceses outside London, like any of those in GAFCON. I await the conservative defence of this kind of thing as “evangelism”, and the aggrieved denials that GAFCON think anything like this, as though the evidence of it is NOT as plain as the nose on your face. “What I have got against them is the militant preaching of homosexuality.” And what does this mean? I find it really funny that demanding that we not be… Read more »

Damo Mackerel
Damo Mackerel
15 years ago

The Reverend Peter Mullen is entitled to his remarks. We supposedly live in a society that protects freedom of speech, no? Liberal Anglican has ruined the Church. The word ‘thinking’ as used in the context of the title for this site, thinking Anglican, surely is an oxymoron?

poppy tupper
poppy tupper
15 years ago

Sorry to be deflected from the main story, but I really think that BillyD is on to something there. It would save education costs and solve the problems of league tables as well as the hormone issue.

cryptogram
cryptogram
15 years ago

Do I see an honorary canonry winging its way from Abuja (or possibly Kampala) to Cornhill?

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
15 years ago

“a whole generation of traditionalistic believers indeed does believe these things, even if they do not always spell them out.” Actually, drdanfee, they do spell them out. A lot of what I address here is the ways in which they spell these ideas out. But given the choice between understanding how their utterances reveal thier attitudes and opposing the evil liberals heathens who are trying to stop them from spreading the Gospel by pointing out such “unimportant” things, they always seem to make the latter choice. Fighting against one’s own oppression, however contrived and self-inflicted it is, is far more… Read more »

Fr Mark
Fr Mark
15 years ago

Damo Mackerel: you’ve popped up from nowhere to tell us we’re not thinking people. Would you like to expand on what you mean and why?

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
15 years ago

“We supposedly live in a society that protects freedom of speech, no?” Indeed we do. But we also practice a religion that has two commandments: Love the Lord thy God, love thy neighbour. He is a leader of that religion. Thus, he has a responsibility in his public statements to reflect that love of God and neighbour. Unless you want to make the rather bizarre claim that his comments express Christian love for gay people, you have to admit that, by making these statements publically, he has broken that Second Great Commandment. Now, we all do, and I argue very… Read more »

dodgey_vicar
dodgey_vicar
15 years ago

Tattooing homosexuals : wasn’t Hitler the last one to tattoo homosexuals? As they arrived at the concentration camps and before they were worked to death or shot?

JCF
JCF
15 years ago

You would think that the “chaplain to the London Stock Exchange”, of all people, would understand that REAL danger these days in getting (involuntarily!) scr*wed up the *rse is NOT coming from homosexuals! [i.e., stock exchange, heal thyself!]

Joan of Quark
Joan of Quark
15 years ago

The LSE has issued a disclaimer, saying that he has no formal links with them, and is therefore Not Their Problem, according to the Telegraph article.

You gotta worry if the LSE thinks you’re so loathsome they need to distance themselves in the midst of certain other things which might be keeping them busy right now….

JPM
JPM
15 years ago

The stock exchange has a chaplain?

What’s next? Brothels and crack houses?

Jay Vos
15 years ago

JCF, yes, I thought the same.

The whole thing is more than pathetic, really.

Jerry Hannon
Jerry Hannon
15 years ago

I’m sure that Damo Mackerel really meant that homosexuals should merely be forced to wear pink triangles on their shirts or jackets.

After all, that was good enough for the Reichsführer, so why go to the trouble of tattooing?

It sure sounds like a freedom of speech issue to me, Damo.

Are there any other classes of people you would like to identify for special markings, and treatment? We obviously need to “think” just as you do, and for my part, I’ll really try.

I do crave your approval.

Father Ron Smith
15 years ago

“The Rev Peter Mullen, who ministers in the City of London, said he had gay friends and the words were “satirical”. He suggested in his internet blog that homosexuals should have their backsides tattooed with the slogan: “Sodomy can seriously damage your health”. One can sometimes admire a bit of clever satirical writing, but this does rather remind me of an oxymoronic blog called ‘Virtue-on-line’, which has a similar take on the presence of women and gays in the Church. The trouble with this sort of blog is that it is a direct incitement to division and discrimination – not… Read more »

Cheryl Va.
15 years ago

I actually liked Gledhill’s article. She made it clear that these types of comments are not unusual from this man. He might go on to be as big an asset to GLBTs, women, liberals and other “unsuitables” as Akinola is.

May God give all such souls bold and honest tongues, so we can hear what they really think.

Graham Ward
Graham Ward
15 years ago

Mad Priest has republished the (now pulled) posting: http://revjph.blogspot.com/2008/10/peter-mullen-unexpurgated.html It deserves to be read in it’s entirety; claims of satire are exposed for the lies they are when you read the rantings of a bigot who presumes to speak for all believers. I wonder how his “dear friends [who] have been and are of that persuasion” feel about “light-hearted jokes” such as this one: “we [believers] disapprove of homosexuality because it is clearly unnatural, a perversion and corruption of natural instincts and affections, and because it is a cause of fatal disease. The AIDS pandemic was originally caused by promiscuous… Read more »

Fr Mark
Fr Mark
15 years ago

Someone (not me) has now set up a Sack the Rev Peter Mullen group on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=43737196024&ref=ts

Repeatedly, the bishops assure us that homophobic hatred has no place in the C of E, and yet, time and time again, we see clergy saying the most horrid and offensive things about gay people and yet retaining their employment. Can the Bishop not simply remove this man’s licence?

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
15 years ago

“The stock exchange has a chaplain?”

I know. And I doubt he or any conservative can fathom what the job of a chaplain to such an institution should actually be.

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
15 years ago

“”we [believers] disapprove of homosexuality because it is clearly unnatural, a perversion and corruption of natural instincts and affections, and because it is a cause of fatal disease. The AIDS pandemic was originally caused by promiscuous homosexual behaviour.”.” I’m of “that persuasion”, in fact, I’ve often been persuaded of it! But I digress. I find the above hilarious, actually, especially when you think about how in Godly Christian Africa, where they stand valiantly for the Gospel against the Western heathens, it is heterosexuals who are spreading AIDS all over the place, corrupt governments stand in the way of delivering what… Read more »

Erika Baker
Erika Baker
15 years ago

Fr Mark
it’s not just that the comments are horrid and offensive, they are also factually wrong, scientifically ignorant and plain stupid. I almost mind that more, because it make this priest either thick (not good in his job) or a liar (even worse).

stephen bates
stephen bates
15 years ago

I am surprised that no one has commented on how hateful also are Mr Mullen’s remarks about Muslims (reported by my colleague Riazat Butt in her Guardian article). A couple of years ago when I was the paper’s correspondent, Mullen approached me (somewhat to my surprise) to ask whether the Guardian would be interested in printing an article he had written criticising Rowan Williams for some remarks made in a Radio Four interview. He told me the Guardian had published articles of his in the past, so I said I would have a look at it. When I saw the… Read more »

Graham Ward
Graham Ward
15 years ago

Stephen, you are absolutely right. And I wish I could have expressed my feelings about him as prosaically as you.
The few posts that still survive in the Google cache don’t include the particular pearl that Riazat spotted, but are very much of the same type – that of the late-night ramblings of a particularly unpleasant right winger, an anti-Muslim, homophobic, mysogynist who clearly thinks himself superior to those around him. What is more, he refers to John Peel as a “mediocrity”. That’s fighting talk.

Fr Mark
Fr Mark
15 years ago

Stephen: yes, you’re quite right, his remarks about Muslims go with the territory, unfortunately.

The whole twisted moral outlook of Dr Mullen, viz let’s kick the boot into anyone who is different or weak (whether they be muslim, female, gay or whatever), has evidently survived a career in the C of E without having been challenged by the organisation he works for, which is scary, isn’t it?

drdanfee
drdanfee
15 years ago

Out pledge to free speech does not exist in a vacuum, abstracted. It is part of a citizenship context in democracy where we form a communal means of complicated discernment, including those important vitamins of agreeing to disagree while living to let live and treating people – so our religion guides us? – as if others were ourselves, our family. Talking trash in public venues – blogs are public virtual venues, not at all like private moments or private letters – necessarily gets a range of critical responses, especially when it trots out flat earth stuff. The boundaries that mark… Read more »

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
15 years ago

From his “apology”: “I was not actually meaning to criticise individual homosexual persons, but the promoters of gay culture.” I guess this is evidence of his vast experience listening to gay people. Wow, with his obviously deep insight into us, why should we be anything but lovey-dovey to the good Chaplain of Mammon? I’d really like to find out what my culture is. Here all this time I thought I was a Newfoundlander, now it appears I actually have another culture entirely, one I am completely unaware of, and what’s more it’s being “promoted” by some people or other. I… Read more »

Richard Ashby
Richard Ashby
15 years ago

When I lived in the North East one of the things to enliven the week was Peter Mullen’s regular article in the Northern Echo (though just what the people of County Durham had done to desrve the rantings of a City rector I never discovered). Suffice it to say that he just couldn’t resist sounding off about what ever it was which had upset him that week, whether it was synods, political correctness, Common Worship, some dreadful act of the Labour Government and so on. This was coupled with accounts of the livery company dinners he had eaten and the… Read more »

Richard Ashby
Richard Ashby
15 years ago

as for his offensive remarks about Muslims and the way they pray, has he ever looked at his congregation while they do the same?

cryptogram
cryptogram
15 years ago

The patrons of Mullen’s living are the Drapers’ Company. It is highly appropriate that the living is “St Michael Cornhill with St Peter le Poer and St Benet Fink”.

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
15 years ago

“Did he ever condemn fat cats and corporate greed from his city pulpit?”

But, everyone knows the fags and liberals are responsible for everything. Why just last week I single handedly bankrupted a bank in Iceland! It’s been quite easy, really. I find all I have to do is kiss my partner in the street and the life savings of at least 15 families go up in smoke. No Church collusion with corporate greed, no compromise of the Gospel behind it, oh no, it’s all because of us untattooed homos.

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