Don't they mean 3+ tier church?

It's already two-tier between males and females.

Has 'separate development' ever been a creative, mutually enriching process? How can he be suggesting this? There are plenty of historical examples to show how it always fails and usually leads to violence.

And on a more day to day and less exalted level: A marriage is made by the couple, the priest merely confirms it during the marriage ceremony. And so I am married whether someone in Canterbury or in Durham or in Abuja sees it that way or not.
It is actually very important that those lgbt people deeply offended by Canterbury’s rhetoric understand that. Neither he nor anyone else can validate or dismiss our marriages. If we consider ourselves married before God, then that’s exactly what we are. The church can withhold the ceremony but not the substance.

If you are a priest or wish to become one, yes, you do have a real problem, because you wed yourself to the structures of the church.
But for the rest of us, we continue to be married, we continue to go to church, to praise God and worship him, and nothing anyone else thinks or believes about that can change this.

What anyone in the church may approve of or not does not change one iota of my relationship with God, of my faith, of the way I worship. It really is time that we focused on God and trusted him, rather than felt beholden to those who claim to represent him. The church has absolutely no influence at all on that most important core of faith. We really do not need its approval or approbation. It’s God’s judgement alone that matters.

Scott Gunn's article is well worth reading.

poppy tupper: "If we consider ourselves married before God, then that’s exactly what we are. The church can withhold the ceremony but not the substance."

That's exactly what my mother was told by our priest in Vermont back in the early 1960s, when she asked him whether or not my brothers and I were bastards because the ceremony had not been performed in a church, but at home by a judge. She had married and divorced a man before she married my Dad; according to the rules of PECUSA at the time she was denied a church marriage for having been divorced. Now of course it's acceptable, but man, the guilt my mother felt then. And yet, she sent her 3 boys to Episcopal schools and eventually became the first woman Senior Warden of our parish.

Jay Vos, you're mixing me up with the estimable Erika Baker (hi, Erika, x). But I agree with you both. And, respect to your mother, and respect to the priest who was so courteous and gracious towards her.

"A marriage is made by the couple, the priest merely confirms it during the marriage ceremony"

Erika, I'd put it a somewhat different way: The marriage is made by God acting through the couple. Is this consistent with a general understanding of the marriage sacrament? I ask becasue it seems pretty clear to me, but I don't know enough of the theology around it.

"If we consider ourselves married before God, then that’s exactly what we are."

Again, I'd say that you're married if God considers you married. This idea that it is the believer alone who carries out the sacrament, that it is the believer's attitude to his/her own status is disturbing. Where's God? I mean that in all seriousness. This perception is something I share with conservatives, though I'm aware enough to know that it is NOT putting yourself in the place of God and refusing to submit to any authority other than yourself, though it easily gives that impression. But, it seems to me a foregone conclusion that if the Power that Be's, the omnipotent Creator and Sustainer of all that is says you are married, then you are, if He says you aren't, then you aren't, and in the latter instance, you can think yourself married till the cows come home and it won't be so. I'm not saying you AREN'T married, just questioning the idea that whether or not you are married in the eyes of God depends on you thinking that you are.

And Jay Vos:
"the guilt my mother felt then. And yet, she sent her 3 boys to Episcopal schools and eventually became the first woman Senior Warden of our parish."

Why the "and yet"?

Scott Gunn's article speaks of being 'created with the gift of [homsexuality]'. Both 'created' and 'gift' are treated as givens, when he knows well that they are precisely the points under dispute:

Both words, 'created' and 'gift', prejudge the genetics/environment debate rather than investigating it.

Laying aside the also-relevant point that a good original creation can be corrupted, there are any number of question-marks here:
-What about identical twin tests that come out in favour of environment as the dominant factor? (E.g., Bailey, Dunne and Martin, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2000 from 4901 questionnaires completed by Australian twins: chances of a self-identified homosexual identical twin having a self-identified homosexual partner was 12%, i.e. scarcely above chance.)
-What about the massive cultural variations in rates of self-identified homosexuals, both between cultures (cf. Ancient Greece with Ancient Judaism; Greenberg's investigation into massive variations between different parts of New Guinea: The Construction of Homosexuality, Univ. of Chicago 1988) and between different parts of cultures (rural and urban, college-educated and non-college-educated)? Laumann, The Social Organisation of Sexuality (re USA: Univ. of Chicago 1994) gives 83% male and 800% female increases from non-college to college; 600% male and 86% female from rural to urban.
-What about the formative influence of one's early sexual experiences?
-What about the possibility of becoming disenchanted with one gender and fleeing to the other in exasperation/revenge?

Ford, to a Lutheran Marriage is no Sacrament. It belongs squarely in the Creation plane. There is not one Marriage for the Christian and another one for the Turk, Dr Martin says. There is only one.

Ford
We're back to the question you consistently ignore whenever I put it to you.
God is in my relationship with me. Through the Holy Spirit in and through my prayers.
When I discern his guidance, I follow it.
In cutting edge ethical questions where The Church has yet to reach a discernment, yet I cannot afford to wait, I have to take my God given responsibility for my life very seriously.

And so I have discerned that my relationship is as God given and as holy as any heterosexual one. My love and I have made solemn promises before God, the same kind of promises heterosexual couples make.
With that, I consider myself to be married and that marriage to be given by God.

I expect the church will catch up in another 50-100 years and retrospectively validate it too.
Of course, I won't be around to see that, so I have to answer personally before God. At exactly that same moment when all of us individually have to answer before God and no hiding behind "the church told me to" will be appropriate.

Leaving aside the marriage point, and same-sex marriage point there, the other point is the worshipping. By going into a church and worshipping there, you are saying that this church and its denomination/ Church is somehow representing you and you go on to represent it - its beliefs and its method of authority. I have stopped taking communion because I recognise that in core beliefs and in rejection of authority I am different, whilst still using it as a vessel of worship in a more general sense and one more consistent (at least) with my general outlook.

Oh, right, I meant Erika. (Note to self: poster's names are below their comments.)

Ford Elms: About the "and yet"? I should have written "she *had* sent her 3 boys...." meaning Mom had remained a faithful Episcopalian despite what had happened.

"Two styles of being Anglican"

That's a big part of the problem isn't it? This is what you get when you are more concerned with being "Anglican" than being Christian. And no, the two are not necessarily synonymous.

Two- tiered Christianity of a particular Anglican "style" is a weird theological abstraction. We either love one another or we don't. You can still disagree on any subject under the sun but at the end of the day if you exclude a sister or brother, or yourself from the Lord's table then it really matters little about "what style" of Anglican you call yourself.

I wonder if there will now be a two-tier funding setup, or if TEC will continue to be expected to pay the bills for this last little bit of the Empire.

IMHO, the "two-track" proposal is for 1. Anglicanism & 2. the CMS plantings.

Christopher:

As it seems you will always and forever reject any evidence that homosexuality is inherent (or at least so early-developed as to be virtually so), there really is no point in arguing the issue with you. Nothing will convince you.

As to the cultural differences you cite...well, that's just it, isn't it? They are CULTURAL differences. In Ancient Greece, there was no (or very little) cultural taboo to homosexuality (or, at least, what WE would call homosexuality--the Ancient Greeks wouldn't have known the term at all); in Ancient Judea, there was. Therefore, it is highly likely that there would be far more "self-identifying" homosexuals in the one than the other...just as there are far more in our own culture now than, say, forty years ago.

"And yet" is what males have relied upon for centuries.

"And yet" women continue to go to church and build communities, even though they are insulted and abused and they and their children violated. "And yet" God keeps this planet in existence even though the men have no awe or reverence for her or its occupants' existence or well-being.

A few years ago the women in South America stopped the drug lords' tyranny of them and their children by all the camps' women refusing to have sex until their men repented of their extreme violence. Would that they would do so now.

God does not accept ultimatums. Women don't have to continue to build churches that abuse them or their children (or their neighbour's either). God does not have to give a new heaven nor a new earth to misogynists, pedophiles, tyrants, liars or thieves. The Cloud of the Divine Presence (that Jesus is meant to return in all "his" glory in the Book of Revelation) is a separate consciousness. SHE does not consent to global genocide.

Jesus and his "perfect" and "complete" priests can not force HER to give them a new heaven nor a new earth, not does she have to "and yet" continue to build Jesus nor his churches.

Jesus wanted to claim to be the God of the Jews?
Then he should have behaved liked the God of the Jews. He didn't, so he isn't.

God does not tolerate misogyny, pedophiles, abuse of orphans. God despises tyranny, liars and thieves. That such souls control Jesus' churches is to Jesus' shame. What's worse than Jesus failing to give the 1000 years of peace, is that Jesus didn't even try. That will be to his eternal shame, and eternity is a long, long time.

Goran, thanks! If ++Rowan really wanted to see some theological work done on marriage, then he might start with Dr. Luther's insight: Marriage is a civil matter, regulated by the state, for the good order of the community. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is approaching the question of same-sex marriages through this theological lens.

In contrast, the overvaluation of heterosexual marriage in recent Anglican theology, which has led to so much trouble, is a theological innovation if there ever were one, and a thoroughly culture-bound innovation as well. It is an outgrowth of the sentimental cult of love-matches that rooted itself in the middle-class mind during the Victorian era. Like so much else Victorian, we mistake this sentimental marriage cult for something that has existed since time immemorial. It isn't, and the Church Fathers would have found it bizarre.

I would like to ask a question along these lines.

The bishop who was the "husband of one wife" in 1 Tim 3.2 -- exactly how was he married? I am no classicist, but what I know of marriage under the Principate tells me that it was generally a private ceremony. It differed from ethnicity to ethnicity and from class to class. It might have religious elements but would not have been a religious ceremony in and of itself. Roman law held that any couple who "held themselves forth" to the communty to be man and wife were man and wife, and that when they ceased to do so, the marriage ceased.

Now if such a marriage was a good enough qualification for one of St. Paul's bishops, why is it not good enough for us? Someone else has to do the theology as well -- I am no theologian either -- but the question might yield results if someone were to follow it up.

'two styles of being Anglican'

like high church and low church....? We've made that work under one roof for quite a while.

Rowan's use of the offensive phrase "lifestyle choice" amazes me. Surely he knows that this is the rhetoric of the far right? A "lifestyle choice" is summering in the south of France, or driving a Mercedes; how flippant to use it of LGBT relationships.

Also, Rowan seems to think that LGBT relationships are in the same category of "lifestyle choice" as de facto heterosexual relationships. Um, heterosexuals can choose at any time to marry, whereas the church denies this option for LGBT people. Some choice!

And Scott Gunn rightly points out that to make celibacy compulsory for a class of people is to depart from normal Anglican understandings of personhood. This church has always understood celibacy to be a gift, not given to all or even to many.

Christopher, some posts back, is, I think, mis-representing the twin study he cites. Baily et al in the early 90s published a study of identical and fraternal male twins. They found that there was a very high correlation between identical twins, and a much closer to average correlation between fraternal twins in terms of sexual orientation. The Australian study Christopher cites was much larger and found not only the same patter for men but also for women. The conclusion of the study is exactly the opposite of what Christopher suggests. For identical twins the correlation of sexual orientation was higher than 50% whereas for fraternal twins it was in the 20% range. That suggests a "nurture" component since 20% above chance. But strongly suggests a genetic component, since 50% is off the scale of chance. Christopher seems to have interpreted the coincidence for non-identical twins as the conclusive number, rather than the control number.

¨What anyone in the church may approve of or not does not change one iota of my relationship with God, of my faith, of the way I worship. It really is time that we focused on God and trusted him, rather than felt beholden to those who claim to represent him. The church has absolutely no influence at all on that most important core of faith. We really do not need its approval or approbation. It’s God’s judgement alone that matters.¨ Erika Baker

EXACTLY! You´ve stated clearly what I´ve always believed...how in the World did the ABC, Lord Carey and various Anglican ¨leaders¨ think millions of us could survive, and love, and worship faithfully at Church and receive the Gifts of God? We are part of the ¨people of God.¨ Many of us, I´m certain, have made a Covenant with God that is far more honorable than the silly/contrived paper that +Gomez and the ABC are trying to PUSH DOWN OUR THROATS?

I know, and I trust will continue know, that at The Anglican Churches of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya NO HONORABLE LGBT PERSON needs the approval of excluders, demeaners, demonizers and ¨haters¨ to love God and one another! Who could trust their leadership anyway? +Akinola, +Orombi/others persecute Christians at Church!

Hugh of Lincoln -- quite so -- but historically the low church have always attempted to get rid of the high church whenever they have the power to do so

I have a suggestion for the Archbishop of Canterbury and others who agree with him that all lesbian and gay people should be celibate: in solidarity with what they are asking of us, let them commit to life-long celibacy; let them share in the painful self-denial they are asking of the lesbian and gay faithful. "For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers" (Matthew 23:4).

... In the case of bishops, this would also do wonders for the ecumenical relationships the Archbishop wants to build with Rome and Constantinople, since those communions agree in denying that bishops may be married.

In short, Cantuar should put his "money" (that's a euphemism, in this case!) where his mouth is.

Hugh of Lincoln cites high and low church as two styles of being Anglican. That was in another country, and the wench is dead.
I'm old enough to have gone to Deanery Chapter Eucharists when everyone received, no matter what the style of celebration, vesture of the celebrant, or form of liturgy. There was no flouncing out and asking for a different mass from a different priest ordained by a diferent bishop. Those days were ended when John Hapgood came up with his barmy scheme for flying bishops.

The solution that resolves Shell's dilemma is fairly obvious. We move from the old Nature vs Nurture frame; we inhabit and investigate by best practice hypothesis testing methods an amended frame - Nature x Nurture. This is more or less the going, effective frame presumed nowadays. We are thus encouraged to study possible or likely factors from both domains, interacting.

Shell or other conservatives are only going to keep having trouble so long as we continue, trying to work things up, using an inadequate former frame, Nature vs Nurture.

Not even modern genetics claims that simple biological factors exist which cause huge outcomes, completely apart from environment - and in the case of animals and humans, what we must call socialization. Language acquisition, for example, has strong biological development determinants or influences; yet is still also distinctly affected by environment, especially socially.

The old framework was not only one-sided, it simply did not ever really exist, though we often categorically presumed it did exist. Yes, particular experiments or studies might more heavily operationalize one side's factors. Any single study profits from not having to test everything including the kitchen sink. But the interpretation of strong data must occur over the long run, using the better comprehensive frame.

Eventually, data from many studies shifted us, to the going frame, Nature times Nurture.

We now study a range of causative and influential factors - even that relative distinction seems too much for Shell's categories? - equally to investigate what makes people straight, or bisexual, or gay along a continuum. Shell also still sounds like he presumes closed, mutually exclusive categories - maybe for male vs female, just as for gay vs straight.

Yet the data has shifted in our models for gender, too. Male/female are long, slow differentiations out of an original fetal matrix which (left unmasculinized, mostly by hormone floods at critical fetal periods) will turn out to spontaneously be more physiologically-morphologically female than male. So far as the original fetal matrix goes, then, female is closer to being the Urgrund than male. Most ancients presumed males were Urgrund, God's original male creation.

If Shell is going to wade into these waters, he would be well advised to go and do some more homework first. Trying to read it all, directly from the scriptures or from past church fathers - well, there is a guaranteed dicety deal. Real flat earth.

Trying to mull over RW's two track business.

Don't we already have two tracks - more than two tracks - going as Anglicans, globally? If all that is more or less going along inside our existing big tent, what will adding some new covenant statement give us, that we do not already have?

The conservative realignment answer is obvious: a means of policing and punishment that is more or less grandly lacking in our current big tent.

Right now, no global Anglican believer has much of a way to dramatically police or punish another Anglican believer. One can give the other a cold shoulder, but that is pretty much all there is to it. We laid down those heavier, meaner communion weapons a bit ago, thanks mainly to somebody called Queen Elizabeth I. We supposedly thought our disarmament was godly, and essential to being Anglican together.

Yet now, taking up arms is all the fashion, and is preached to be quintessentially Anglican to boot. Curiously, even while RW is talking about structures in which surely conservative believers will try hard to weaponize; he dreams of a two tier Anglican Communion, free from all rancor, free from all weapons.

Curious. Has RW really been listening carefully to the Anglican rights? if the rights alone can speak and vote, won't they pass rather nasty things about the folks who cannot speak and vote? Won't they continue to pass deeply nasty things about queer folks as one of their fav targets? What dreams could RW be having? Iker, Schofield, Gomez, Duncan, Orombi, Jensen - disarming? Is RW on drugs (prescription or street)?

The most discussed outcome is supposed to be that conservative Anglicans will gain a means to finally police-punish all others. However, occasionally somebody or other glimpses that in certain scenarios, the others could end up policing-punishing the conservatives. Since no conservative ever says out loud that he or she might be ungodly or wrong in something; the Anglican rights are little entertaining that scenario.

A whole other group of folks are worrying that the addition of police-punish would be the real tear in our global Anglican fabric, such that the real Anglicanism would surely cease to exist. Or at least, that weaponizing would put our global Anglican economies of exchange and service and mutual witness, on a starvation diet.

Christopher Shell makes an interesting suggestion:

"-What about the possibility of becoming disenchanted with one gender and fleeing to the other in exasperation/revenge?"

Perhaps this is a motivation of some ex-gays? They have been jilted or spurned by their own sex so they set themselves up in a heterosexual marriage. saying "that will show them!" The problem then is that their marriage has more to do with the love-object that has spurned them than with the person they marry.

Or a misogynistic male might say. "OK, Ladies, I've had enough!" and go for a homosexual binge instead.

Of course in order to live out such scenarios one would have to be around the middle of the Kinsey Scale and have a flexible psychology. They have nothing to do with the etiology of sexual orientation.

Bisexuality remains a much neglected topic, and within its unknown penetralia such scenarios as Christopher Shell imagines might offer themselves for our study.

Those who are positive that identical twins have completely identical genes should read this article about research at the University of Alabama in Scientific American (Identical Twins' Genes Are Not Identical): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=identical-twins-genes-are-not-identical. I think any parent of twins would tell you they aren't identical!

Your "facts" are highly speculative, Mr. Shell, and cannot stand in the face of one, simple question:

What about what we keep telling you about ourselves?

HI drdanfee- Yes, I have always been greatly in favour of not polarising genetics and environment, aince both are clearly in play and both will clearly have a role. The question is, however, a different one: which factor is the stronger, and buy what percentage? One so often hears people speaking as though everyone knows the whole thing is genetic/inborn. That is very strange since no gene has emerged, and even if it did we are not robots: not the slaves of our genes.

hi SW-
You are right that there were two Bailey studies (1991, 2000) - and have been still others by other researchers. But the 52% and 22% figures belong to the earlier study not the later. Bailey admitted (2000, p533) that this later/larger Australian study 'did not provide statistically significant support for the importance of genetic factors' and that 'concordances [ie figures for homosexual-matches] from prior studies were inflated'.

Hi Spirit of Vatican II - I am also greatly in favour of not polarising heterosexuality and homosexuality, since Kinsey's scale (was it?) rightly sees several gradations. Christianity of course rules out active bisexuality totally since (a) that would be against the principle of monogamy and (b) it has never been a Christian option simply to obey every instinct. Our animal nature is often seen as the enemy in Christian scripture and tradition. But in general this non-polarisation of homosexuality and heterosexuality (falsely presenting them as the only two options) increases, rightly, the role of the volitional factor in attempting to understand human behaviour. Present civil law will have to contend with the clear fact that they are not the only two options. It clearly discriminates against bisexual and polyamorous marriages.

There is also the factor that Paul may be rightly arguing in Rom that the true situation is hyper-sexuality: people getting bored of the natural way of things and trying (overflowing into) something more illicit. Our culture's experience with drugs suggests that people cannot get that 'zing' unless they are one jump the wrong side of the law, or of mother nature.

Hi Mark Brunson-
The type of fact that is least speculative of all is the research-based type.

"Christianity of course rules out active bisexuality totally since (a) that would be against the principle of monogamy..."

Bisexuality does not imply polygamy. It simply means a person has equally strong attractions to both sexes. It does not mean that he or she cannot fall in love with ONE person (of either sex) and live in a loving, monogamous relationship with that one person forever.

You might as well say that because I have an equally strong attraction for blondes and redheads, I am incapable of choosing one or the other as a lifelong partner!

"I expect the church will catch up in another 50-100 years and retrospectively validate it too."

This is the point, Erika. I have had enough conversations with you to know that you are a very devout, spiritual person. Yet, it blows me away that you should think the Church needs to catch up with you! You appear to have set yourself up as the arbiter. I know that that kind of arrogance is NOT a part of your makeup, but can you see how statements like these give that impression?I come from a very different place. I am one of God's fallible creations. I stand before a Being who is all powerful, who created and sustains the entire Universe about which we still know next to nothing. He is further beyond us than we are from insects. He is at the same time incomprehensible to us, yet comprehensible to us in Christ. Yet He loved us so much He became not just one of us, but one of the least of us, and suffered the worst we could throw at Him, and all to bring us back to Himself becasue He loves us so much. And not because we do things He likes either, but because He made us in His image and that image is there in all of us, regardless of how much sin and evil we have covered it up with.

I simply cannot talk about the status of my relationship in the eyes of such a Being as something that I get to decide and that I get to tell HIM is right. I also do not feel the imperative you do to have it all figured out now. Think about it this way: for well over a hundred years, Christians tore themselves apart over the ideas of religious imagery. We eventually decided that such imagery was an important part of our undestanding of the Incarnation. We in the West forget that the Seventh Ecumenical Council pronounced anathemas on those who do NOT venerate images, and our Orthodox brethren do it every year on the first Sunday of Lent on the front steps of their churches. Does that mean that all the iconoclasts who died before that last Council and therefor did not have the opportunity to change their minds according to the Council's decision are all now roasting painfull in Hell? Of course not. I rather suspect that God is more generous than that! Same with us. In the end, I agree that it is each of us who will make answer for ourselves before the Throne. You will also take from this that I have a dim view of thsoe who see marriage as validation of their relationships, and that the Church somehow owes them this validation. Frankly, if redemption, if all I just talked about, is not validation enough, what could ever possibly be? So, to answer your question about what you are supposed to do now: chill out! Relax. God loves you, and no conservative can tell you He doesn't.Stop worrying about what to call your relationship, or your partner, or about who will and will not shake your hand at Mass. God loves you. Even if they beat you to death in the street, what will they have? Another dead Christian who at that point is laughing them to scorn, having won the voctory, so what will they have won?

"Christianity of course rules out active bisexuality totally since (a) that would be against the principle of monogamy..."

So you also don't know what it is to be bisexual, I see.

Julia Duin's article is critiqued here:
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/archbishop_of_canterbury/some_of_the_conservative_respo.html

Ford
I am not telling God what he has to accept, as you very well know.
But I do not share your lofty view of the church or its discernment processes.

What I see is that it's discernment processes are as human as everyone else’s - how could it be other, seeing that it's made up of fallible human beings.
Someone said that because the church believes in broad agreement before it calls something a new discernment, it is automatically on a very conservative track.
That is not in itself bad, but it does mean that it relies on others who force the conversation and who lead these processes.
That is not negative, it is just how it is. There are prophets, and there are, eventually, those who heed them or who decide that they were false prophets after all.

This means that some of us occupy a prophetic space and cannot use "the church" as our focal point, but that we have to look directly to our own perception of God.
Those who first step out into something new are truly brave, and they may well be wrong. But it is their God given role to do this.

So in terms of process, what I see is that the church consistently misses the boat in any new topic of human awareness.
You may believe in a God who abhors human rights, but I firmly believe that where there are human rights, there is also the theology to marry them up with Christianity.

And what I see here is that an awful lot of good theology has been done.
Many Western countries have recognised the equality of lgbt people and of their relationships.
Many Christians have discerned (not told God, Ford, but discerned) that society is right in this case.

And so, based on what I know of God, based on my personal experience of him, and based on the compassionate, intelligent, differentiated theology I have read, and based on the fruits I have observed in people's lives, I do think that I am where God is leading, and that the rest of the church will eventually catch up. God may prove me wrong in the end –he may prove any one of us wrong. That does not absolve us from the responsibility of making choices. Knowing of his forgiving love helps to give us to courage to do so.

"of course rules out active bisexuality totally"

I have stopped reading your uneducated posts, but since others have quoted this in their replies I thought I'd wade in again.

Just for your information - because you clearly need some! I am bisexual. This means that I married a man when I fell in love with a man, and that, unlike when a homosexual marries heterosexually, my marriage was successful, both in emotional and in physical terms. Then I fell in love with a woman, and I am now civil partnered to her. And again, this is an emotionally as well as physically successful relationship.

If my love should ever die before me, I would be able to look for a next partner among men as well as women.

I have never been tempted by 2 people at the same time, I have never found monogamy to be in the least bit challenging, and I have never engaged in sexual activity with more than one person at the same time.

Crumbs - even notoriously unreliable Wikipedia can come up with a scientific definition of bisexuality! You really really really need to educate yourself a little better if you want to be taken seriously in these conversations.

Ah Mr. Shell, nice to hear that you aren't depending on Nature vs Nurture, necessarily.

So, now we can get on more fully to consider a key question: Is anything good in the outcomes of nature x nurture that so far as we know now, regularly results in queer folks existing, all around our planet? We ask, particularly: Are we able to see and appreciate any goods - practice? ethical? In the modal outcomes, those patterns we can perceive, in modern daily life for queer folks, especially in non-punitive cultural-legal contexts, such as western democracies?

(A blog isn't roomy enough for comprehensive scholarly details.)

The contemporary (past hundred fifty years or so, taken cumulatively) summary answer is, resoundingly, clearly:
Yes.

We can perceive practical goods in queer folks' daily lives. Ethical goods, too.

Evidence?

One, a huge number of empirical studies have tested what is good about queer folks' daily personality and behavior. Two, we know a whole lot of queer folks nowadays – a majority of whom are clearly competent, even thriving. That's a big mountain of practical good, ethical good, too.

Key markers?

Let's start with truth telling. A practical good, and also an ethical ideal.

Next? Caring. Common sense, garden variety, human caring.

Though being gay does not automatically, infallibly transform you into a simply wonderful person with striking empathy skills; more often than not, we will find queer folks occupying the helping professions, in far greater percentages than their statistical minority status would predict in simple statistical correspondance.

Next?

Combine honesty and caring, practically and ethically. Now we get all manner of social, political, economic, and yes religious - activism. Trying to personally embody, agitate, educate, lobby, and generally face up to the constant generational pull that makes queer folks hope they can join with others to make this world a better place.

So?

This constant negative conservative-traditional religious picture - which constantly, loudly paints queer folks as Cheap Thrills Obsessives, Anything Goes People? Lies, all lies. Sad lies.

So?

Yes, there are some Cheap Thrills-Anything Goes people, gay or straight. Cheap Thrills Straights are never, ever told they must clean up by ceasing to be straight.

If possibilites of human sexual life exist, such that practical-ethical goods obtain, can we correct our beliefs?

Lastly? How could believers be in such deep, grand error about queer folks, for so very, very, very long?.

"it's discernment processes are as human as everyone else’s - how could it be other, seeing that it's made up of fallible human beings."

Every human being individually is fallible. Yes, the Church can be fallible too, and gets it wrong. She has strayed from the Gospel, and much of what is happening today is an attempt to correct that straying and return to God. That's why it's so painful for conservatives. They are confortable in the traditional staatus quo, which was blessed by the Church. They just can't see that She was wrong to bless that status quo in the first place. But surely thousands and thousands of people prayerfully and meditatively aprroaching an issue (OK that's idealistic, but bear with me) have a better chance of discerning the will of God than one lone human being.

"You may believe in a God who abhors human rights"

Cheap shot, Erika. I thought a long time before posting my response. I figured some of it would get under your skin, though I tried to minimize that risk. So I guess I asked for this. And, yes, I do know you are not making things up as you go along, or telling God what's right. It was one of the eye opening things from our offline conversations, actually, how far apart we could be in the way we express things, but how solid your consciousness of God's presence in your life was, and how close we could be in some beliefs. God is far more real for you than for some of our more shall we say conservative brethren, for whom God appears more like an abstract lawgiver, more a code than a God. But do you see how:

"If we consider ourselves married before God, then that’s exactly what we are"

is going to sound to a conservative who is just itching for something, anything, to justify calling you a faithless heathen?

On another note, you say:

"I have never found monogamy to be in the least bit challenging"

Don't you find it funny that the only people who make the comparison between how difficult it is to not cheat on their spouses and how difficult it must be to resist "homosexual inclinations" are always conservative straight men? What is it about conservatives that they just can't seem to keep it in their pants, while we hedonistic not-made-by-God homos don't seem to have a problem with it?

Erika,
Thanks for your helpful post about bisexuality.

The problem, as you surely recognize, is that many (most?) "conservatives" consistently reduce non-heterosexual sexuality to actions, because (it appears) they fear admitting that non-heterosexual sexuality is something more complex than where we stick our genitals. So, they assume that "bisexual" must mean that a person wants to have sex with men and women at the same time, and that this is what bisexual people actually do. They have trouble with the notion that sexual orientation is about who we ARE not what we DO, and that a person's sexual orientation is no less real and essential if they don't "act" on it through sexual intercourse.

Now, to change focus a bit.... It does amuse me that the people who express the most horror over the idea of polyamory revere a Scripture that is full of stories about righteous people having multiple sexual partners (I'm reading through 1-2 Samuel right now, and just went through the references to David's SEVEN wives [2 Samuel 3:2-5, 13-16], not to mention his "ambiguous" relationship with Jonathan!).

No. The type of fact that is least speculative is the lived fact.

You live in a world of research, reducing us to lab rats you play with. It's inhuman of you, and your response shows that you have no comprehension of us.

How could we possibly include you in our counsels?

Ford
"But surely thousands and thousands of people prayerfully and meditatively aprroaching an issue (OK that's idealistic, but bear with me) have a better chance of discerning the will of God than one lone human being."

You know me well enough by now to know that for something to make sense to me it has to be true in the extremes of life, not merely in that particular moment of history I find myself in.

The first few people to take up the fight against slavery were not wrong just because thousands of prayerful people weren't joining them immediately. If anything, their actions and arguments eventually converted thousands of prayerful people to changing their minds over the ensuing years.

The bible has a strong tradition of prophets and of lone voices in the wilderness.
That does not mean that everyone who believes they hear a call from God is automatically a prophet. But it cannot be right do dismiss the concept of prophetic vision and action out of hand.
The church needs its prophets as much as the prophets need their church. One cannot claim to be superior to the other.

And in the case of same sex relationships, we're actually years and years further on from those isolated first prophets who called us to wake up to God's truth, and thousands and thousands of prayerful people HAVE already been hearing and following, each in their own way. Some have lived those lives openly and with courage for all to see their fruits. Others have done oustanding theology. Others have tirelessly engaged in bruising conversations, often putting themselves in great danger. Whole national churches have begun to hear it too and to change accordingly.

To say we have to wait until the last Christian in the world has also seen the light is emphasising the role of the church to an almost ridiculous degree and to minimise the theology of prophecy virtually out of existence.

Hi Erika and Pat-
I said 'active bisexuality' not 'bisexuality'.

Erika's point about educated/uneducated is of course an assertion rather than an argued point - but that does not make it inaccurate. The reason I believe it to be inaccurate is that out of all the participants in a conversation the one[s] who take the trouble to familiarise themselves with research data are, all things being equal, not showing themsleves to be less or equally educated compared with those who do not, but rather more so. All things being equal.

So what is required is an explanation of why the very participant[s] who want to rely on research-fact rather than on opinions based on insignificantly-small samples should be the very one[s] considered unintelligent. In any other circumstances it would, obviously, be the other way round - so why not this time? I could understand if a higher proportion of this conversation were based on research data - but currently it isn't - and perhaps never would have been were it not for my encouragement.

This looks like an anomaly. Of course, an outsider would say that participants are simply disagreeing with those whose opinions are unwelcome to their lifestyle and culture (believing what they want to believe). Or is there another explanation?

What is intrinsically unintelligent about quoting research data, as opposed to not doing so?

Ah! Now I see.

This has never been about Truth, or well-being, but about making Mr. Shell look clever.

No interest in that, thank you. I'm afraid I have to live in reality not remove myself from it.

I'm a Christian, you see.

Bisexuality is not something that can be "active" or "inactive". It just "is". A bisexual individual might act upon his or her attraction to another person, just as a heterosexual will, but there's nothing to suggest that that attraction is always--or even often--to one of each sex simultaneously.

Hi Mark Brunson-
Which lived fact do you mean? If it is the fact that you and many others currently feel drawn to your own gender, then who has ever denied that? The question we were raising was a different one: the proportions of genetic and environmental explanation that we should use to account for this universally-agreed phenomenon. As everyone knows, one cannot gain knowledge of genetics, or even of the varying proportions involved, by instrinct alone. That is why research is necessary. But research is necessary in order to obtain maximally large-scale, accurate, objective data in all parts of life. There is nothing dehumanising about wanting to be accurate, since the only alternative is to be inaccurate, and what sort of person wants that? Every honest person cannot but want to be as accurate as possible. It also can't be at all accurate to portray lived facts and researched facts as being poles apart. Not only is there often a massive overlap between them (since research is very often based on the lived facts to which people bear witness in questionnaires), but it stands to reason that in order to be maximally truthful and accurate we will need to take full account of *all* kinds of facts, researched, lived, researched-and-lived, and all other kinds as well. The more the better, since it will help us to be the more accurate and truthful.

Hi WilliamK-
You also mistook my intentions, as you'll see from reading my post. I was the very one who specified 'active' bisexuality in the first place.
The truth is (a) that scripture tells all sorts of stories, which are full of good characters and bad characters (the fact that Herod appears as a character means we have to emulate him?); (b) we are NT people not OT people, and you blurred the distinction as though Jesus had never happened. If anyone told me to smite Amalekites, I would not do it.
(c) You must provide evidence if you attribute actions of other people (inside whose heads you are not) to 'fear', against their own witness - or else provide good reason to believe that you know said people (even those you have never clapped eyes on) better than they know themselves.
If you're to class me with the conservatives rather than the truth-seeking eclectics, then you'll have to provide an answer for why my criteria for proving biblical inerrancy/inspiration (a central key for evangelicals) are at the very opposite pole of stringency from those of said conservatives.

"To say we have to wait until the last Christian in the world has also seen the light is emphasising the role of the church to an almost ridiculous degree and to minimise the theology of prophecy virtually out of existence."

That's not exactly what I'm saying. In Ware's The Orthodox Church, he discussed the idea of what makes something Orthodox. He points out that there have been numerous councils, but only seven have been considered Ecumenical. Why? Because they came to be accepted by the whole Church. He conveniently skirts the issue that this was only accomplished by declaring that the people who didn't accept the decisions of these councils were not actually part of the Church any more. Essentially bullying by the majority. It's messy, and, you're right, God CAN and DOES do new things, especially when His followers have become so enmeshed in the existing sociopolitical environment as to confuse that with the Gospel. That's the state we're in now and that conservatives are trying to preserve. I think we're saying similar things from opposite sides of the fence. We both perceive that it is a messy process, we both agree that change takes time, and I DO agree with you that our earliest pushes for change are often resisted by the wider Church that has become enmired in the sociopolitical status quo. But I am not so selfreliant in these matters as you, or perhaps it's just that we have a different approach. For me, it isn't about what the Church tells me in an absolute sense, nor is it about what I think is right. It's about, am I trying as best I can to live out the Two Great Commandments (and the answer to that, as evidenced here, is often 'no'), and do I have faith that the rest is in God's hands. The Church can, and will, sort it out eventually. We agree, I think, that God is on control. I think what's happening here is that you perceive a need for a more absolute authority, and I agree the Church can't fill that role completely. So, ultimately, you are forced to rely on your own perception of what God is calling you to do, because in the end your faith in the involvement of God in your life is the only authority you can have confidence in. I respect that. It's not that I have a different ultimate authority, but that I don't have the same need for an ultimate authority. Call an innate wishy washiness, if you will. But, I strongly believe that in the end it isn't what our absolute principles are that matters all that much. I mean, they can only ever be absolute principles for me anyway. What is important, what pretty much defines how the average faceless human being lives out the Gospel isn't determined by what absolute principles you proclaim to the world, but whether the living of those principles manifests itself in love of God and love of neighbour. I think that's the point of follwoing the spirit of the law, not the letter. If we rigidly follow the letter of the law, then we will at times behave in a nonChristian way despite our obedience.

Christopher

You're still not getting it.
AA bisexual person is someone who is capable of forming emotionally and physically satisfying relationships with people of either sex.

An active bisexual is a non-celibate person who is living in a sexual relationship with one person of either sex.

Once you have more than one partners at the same time, the same terminology and rules apply as to anyone else.

It really is not actually complicated.

Ford
The difficulty I have with your theology is that you appear to believe that waiting for the whole church to come to a conclusion is not making a decision.

I do not understand what you mean when you say that you do not have the need for an ultimate authority. God simply IS. He is real, present, a constant force in my life. And he HAS, IS ultimate authority.
Isn't that what faith is about?
So the only question is how we live that out.
And you appear to believe that living in a same sex relationship but not asking the church to bless it is one way of respecting the thought that any single one of us is incapable of understanding God, but the community that makes up The Church might, eventually.

Whereas I believe that The Church only ever makes any discernment long after the question has ceased to be cutting edge. But if my life requires cutting edge answers, I have no choice but to trust my own judgement.
By definition, the church judgement lags behind because the discernment processes are more complicated.

So I could understand you better if you said that you’d live a celibate life until the church has discerned that your love is acceptable to God after all.
But if you say that you have a partner, yet don’t mind if the church doesn’t bless that relationship… then I genuinely do not understand what your religion is about.
What I hear you saying is that, in your private life, you have discerned that God doesn’t mind you having a same sex relationship, but in a separate religious life, you accept that God might have different thoughts.

And if you were to abandon your partner because you believed that the church’s discernment is more important than your own… well, then you still would have made a decision.
You simply cannot avoid that responsibility of choice.

What lived fact? Are you deliberately being obtuse?

This is sophistry on your part, Mr. Shell. Surely you see that? You wish to treat us as things, laboratory experiments. We are not.

Research data? Data only means what one wants it to mean. It can't speak, so it is formed into opinions - and only opinions - by men. There is no actual "objective research" because no human can rise completely out of his own experience. In fact, all research findings, all scientific data, is inherently anecdotal because it appears within the milieu of specific space-time and within the limited perception of the researcher. It is only "accurate" within that infinitessimal slice of space-time-mind.

This is a fine approach to non-sentient life, but not to humans, nor to religious questions. It denies soul, spirit. It's fine to apply to the orderly running of economy, the mechanics of governance - perhaps - but not to the maintenance of harmony in society.

I'm trying to make you see that you're embracing a failed mode of thinking when addressing something as complex as even one individual human.

Hi Erika-
I did not realise that 'active bisexual' was such a formal term. I was using it with a different meaning: namely, being active-ly bisexual / actively involved in sexaul actions with both genders. It is not obvious that 'active bisexual' cannot (at least sometimes) be a phrase used for 'someone who is actively involved sexually with both genders'.

Hi Erika-
However, the main point is that any such 'bisexual' lifestyle is, to an elephant-in-the-room degree, miles from anything that has ever been associated with Christianity. Yet for daring to say so, am I to be threatened or treated with contempt?

Christopher
The elephant in the room is not that a bisexual lifestyle is un-Christian, but that you do not know what bisexuality is about and when told still insists that it can mean something different, just because that's how you would like to define it.

There is an official and objective meaning for words like this, and bisexuality simply means the innate capacity to love people of both sexes.
What you do with that innate capacity is subject to the same moral standards that apply to everyone.

An active heterosexual is someone who has a heterosexual relationship. The word active says nothing about how many people that heterosexual is active with, it simply says that he or she is not celibate.

An active homosexual is someone who has a heterosexual relationhip. The word active says nothing about how many people that homosexual is active with, it simply says that he or she is not celibate.

An active bisexual.... ok?

You may chose to ignore that and insist on a different interpretation, but the elephant is then your chosen ignorance.

Whoops!
"An active homosexual is someone who has a heterosexual relationhip." was meant to read "who has a homosexual relationship, of course".

Mark-
Sorry to keep banging on, but are you going to close down all the scientific and social-scientific departments that rely on research data and statistics? One reason they are called scientific at all is that their claims have some factual, numeric basis. You and I will agree that this kind of gathering knowledge must be superior to a much-more-random and much-smaller-sample approach, which would be the approach we were left with if our only means for finding out the way things were was doing a straw poll of our friends and acquaintances. Statistics are regularly the least bad (and in many ways, a positively good) way of acquiring certain types of knowledge. Truth is not exactly the same thing as accuracy and precision; but truth is (by definition) never, ever inaccurate or imprecise.

Your remark on 'making Mr Shell look clever' is unworthy of you. It is not, in any case, particularly clever to be able to look up research data, albeit it is responsible to do so, since one cannot form opinions without it. The point was only that to do so can scarcely be less clever than failing to do so. That would be an eccentric, self-contradictory point of view. All I was doing was contradicting it - but I would not have needed to do so had people not practised a research-shunning praxis in the first place.

In a world of open-mindedness and honesty, the sharing of research data is welcomed. Whereas I often find the worst reactions precisely when I do so. What is the term for that? Obscurantist? Anti-education? I don't know.

"What I hear you saying is that, in your private life, you have discerned that God doesn’t mind you having a same sex relationship, but in a separate religious life, you accept that God might have different thoughts."

No, Erika, what you hear me saying is that, confident though I may be of the presence of God in my life, and that He has led me to where I am, I have no right to demand that the Church accept that, much less bless it. The Church is made up of a very large number of people, every single one of them at a different place in the path to God than I am. All of them working out their own salvation in fear and trembling, just like I am. I cannot expect them to have the same relationship with God that I do, nor can I assume that my relationship with God is somehow better or more authoritative. I am called not to put stumbling blocks in their way, not to be the cause of another Christian falling. It honestly surprises me that you would have difficulty with the idea that I can be assured of God's approval of my relationship and yet not mind the Church not blessing it. Why should it be important if people, all of them with different relationships with and understandings of God than I do cannot have the same faith of God's love for me than I do? They are where they are in this. What right do I have to demand that they see God the way I do? Why is it suddenly acceptable for me to be a stumbling block to others? Just because their behaviour is a stumbling block to some gay people? Retaliation isn't very Christian. Or is it just because I need to have some public display of the validity of my relationship, or of my confidence that God blesses my relationship, or of my victory over the conservatives, or what? Why is the public acknowledgement of what is a matter of faith for me so important? In fact, me being a child of the 60s "I don't need the world's approval to love you, and I don't need anyone's permission to have sex with you, so why conform to an antiquated method of crowd control" attitude of marriage, I really don't understand it. My generation rebelled against the whole idea of marriage as something one HAS to do in order to have one's relationship accepted. We were the ones who made "shacking up" common. I bought into that then, and I still buy into it now. If it means something for others, then I'm glad for them, but to me it seems like a reversal of the clock, honestly.

And I don't understand, and I am not trying to insult you at all, why you bother with a insitution that you seem to think can't really help you spiritually. What about the Church draws you to it? It has no authority, it gets things wrong all the time, the surrounding society is way ahead of the Church on social issues, always has been. How do you explore your spirituality, and I know you do, in an institution that seems to me, to judge by the things you say, to be a hindrance rather than a help? Yet, I have read you speaking with great affection about people in your own congregation, even those who oppose your marriage. But these people ARE the Church. Do you see the Church and the people you speak so appreciatively of to be different entities?

Ford
I just don't understand it. Please bear with me.
You are saying that, privately, you are confident of God's approval of your relationship, so you don't need the church to validate it too, but you can respect that the church is made up of lots of different individuals who should not be forced to see things your way.

But that's exactly my own position.
I don't want to force the church either. Maybe unlike you I do want to influence it, because I'm a part of it and there's a discernment process and I'm participating. You appear to be happy to let it get on with it on it’s own… well, sort of… you are participating simply by virtue of engaging publicly here.

But when I tell you that I base my personal life choices on my own discernment of God, you call me arrogant for believing that I can discern God's will better than the church can.

I suppose I don't know what "the church" is for you.
You see, I cannot make any distinction between a personal part of self and a religious part. I am part of the body of Christ, every second of my life. There is no part of me that external to the church and a part of me that's internal. The church is made up of every single believer, whether they join a particular sub-group of it and pray together on a Sunday or not.

You make your own choices, you feel they're in tune with God - so you don't allow the church any authority over your life. The only authority you allow it is over the particular ritual of blessing, as though that truly made a difference to God.
And yet, you say that, somehow, the church has great authority, that it alone can discern God’s will.
So over whom does the church have authority? To do what? When?
And does it discern God’s will, or doesn’t it? And if you really believe it does, how can you be brave enough to go against its discernment and make up your own mind? And why is my believe in my discernment of God’s will arrogant, but yours isn’t?

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be obtuse, I just really don't get it.

"Your remark on 'making Mr Shell look clever' is unworthy of you."

Yet, you seem to have no problem deeply insulting gays and lesbians and telling them you didn't. Mote. Beam.

"Truth is not exactly the same thing as accuracy and precision; but truth is (by definition) never, ever inaccurate or imprecise. "

Truth is what is important. That is discerned, not researched. I will say it one more time in the hope that it will finally get through: WE ARE NOT LAB EXPERIMENTS! Do you get it?

This is why I think you play intellectual games to score points. You have no problem throwing around questions like "Just because it's happening, does that mean it's good?" while countering claims of goodness - which is purely subjective - by demands for "research" and "data" and "chapter and verse."

What I see is not an attempt to arrive at Truth, but an attempt, on your part, to use your definition of accuracy and precision to justify a preset prejudice. We are all operating from prejudices - even scientists.

As to the scrapping of scientific departments, you are either - again - being deliberately obtuse, or read only part of what I wrote.

Hi Mark B-
'Truth is discerned not researched' - did you really say that?

Let's close down all schools and research establishments. After all, we know that every person's 'discernment' will be exactly the same, and that there will be no subjective element whatever.