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Literary Review
THE VIEW FROM KING STREET
Cottages and heavenly mansions
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CHRISTOPHER HURST looks at the current debate in the worldwide Anglican communion over the interface between homosexuality and the Christian priesthood.
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REUTERS
THE word "cottaging" is probably unfamiliar to most readers of The Hindu. A "cottager" is defined in the Oxford dictionary as "a person, usually a rural labourer, living in a cottage". However, on June 9 the House of Lords voted by 133 to 95 to back a Conservative amendment to a government bill that would ensure that cottaging remains illegal and punishable by law; the bill would have included it with other offences against public decency. So what is cottaging? It means having sex in a public toilet when the participants are a couple of men. And why "cottaging"? Because many public toilets, women's as well as men's, are small red-brick constructions with steep-pitched tiled roofs and the entrance shielded by a hedge or shrubs, they can be thought by a stretch of the imagination to resemble cottages. So it has become a euphemism, in the form of a play on words, for the practice of men frequenting them in order to engage in sexual acts.
A consequence of this is that citizens who wish to use public toilets for their proper purpose have become reluctant to enter out of fear of witnessing, and by witnessing being in a sense party to, a criminal act, or of themselves being suspected of cottaging because of their very presence there. Doubtless this practice has been going on ever since public toilets were invented — there are many frustrated homosexuals around — but it has become recognised in Britain as a social problem. A number of public toilets have been closed — at great inconvenience to the public.
The Conservative amendment would ensure specifically that people who have sex in public toilets will face prosecution and up to two years in prison The government claims, with reason, that this is unworkable. But the Tory speakers were adamant that the practice is disgusting and an offence that can never be tolerated. What is surely true is that if people with full bladders are deterred from relieving themselves in the only socially acceptable way, the time has come for some remedial action.
Certain aspects of the gradual liberalisation of the law on homosexuality have met with stiff resistance before, and been voted out by our Upper House — as when, led by the late Baroness Young, it opposed lowering the age of consent for homosexual acts in private from 18 to 16. The homosexual lobby, and by extension a whole swathe of liberal opinion, have not forgiven the Thatcher government for legislating to outlaw the "promotion" of homosexuality in education, and condemn the Blair government for having so far failed to repeal this measure. (Even to a relatively liberal person it might seem incredible that teachers in publicly funded schools could possibly get away with actively promoting homosexual practice to immature youngsters — as opposed, say, to encouraging tolerance of it when practised discreetly by others. Yet this was actually the case.) On rare occasions men in the public eye have been prosecuted, and their careers ruined, for cottaging or similar behaviour in public places. Around 1950, when even private homosexual acts could still earn a prison sentence, one of the greatest actors of the age appeared in a police court for this reason, and was given a light fine. The case did the actor's reputation no harm whatever. Not many years ago a newly-appointed Anglican diocesan bishop was revealed to have been prosecuted many years earlier for cottaging. He claimed that it was a one-off aberration and that he was not a homosexual, and the appointment went ahead. Could that forgotten incident illustrate how very common homosexuality, in one form or another, actually is? The sexuality of clerics, and especially of bishops, has come up for public discussion often in the recent past. Most often it involves Roman Catholic priests indulging in what is now always referred to as "child abuse" but used to be called pederasty (i.e. being over-affectionate with adolescent boys), and their misdemeanours, when discovered, being hushed up by their bishops. But in June 2003 the issue exploded in the heart of the Anglican establishment. It has long been debated between liberals and Evangelicals (strict Protestants who tend to interpret the Bible literally) whether open homosexual practice can be tolerated among lay people who receive the sacraments. It has now gone further than that: to whether it is tolerable in the clergy.
For someone with strong homosexual inclinations, conversion to heterosexuality is all but impossible. So the inclination will always be there, even if the difficult path of celibacy is chosen. At the private boarding schools I attended in the late 1930s and 40s there were many middle-aged and elderly bachelor masters. Probably most, with their slender salaries, could not have afforded to marry respectably and raise a family, and because of the tight little worlds they lived in, any straying from the path of self-denial, with partners of either sex, could have brought disgrace and the ruin of their careers. But what of their private suffering? Or, living in a world not then publicly sex-mad, perhaps they did not suffer quite as much as might be expected today.
The scandal in June 2003 was caused by the Bishop of Oxford appointing the canon-theologian of Southwark cathedral in London, Dr. Jeffrey John, to the suffragan (junior) bishopric of Reading in his diocese. Dr. John, in his early 50s, is openly homosexual and has had a committed relationship with a male partner for 27 years. Formerly it was a physical one, but he says that, although the relationship continues, he is now celibate. One does not need to disbelieve him to feel that his present celibacy is irrelevant to the issue, which has divided the Anglican communion — within the English hierarchy but, more dramatically, world-wide. The primates of Anglican churches in Africa, which account for millions of members, have taken an especially hard anti-liberal line on the issue. Broadly the division was between liberals, who believed that Dr. John would make a good bishop and that his sexuality concerned only himself, and Evangelicals who regard all homosexual practice as abominable and against the law of God as enunciated in the Bible: they consider that by having once been in a physical relationship with his long-time lover Dr. John permanently disqualified himself for his new office. They were prepared to forgive him if he repented of his past, but there was no chance that he would ever do that. In the end he was persuaded by the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams, who is on record as being sympathetic to homosexual clergy, to stand down for the sake of church unity, to the indignation of liberals.
More recently, an openly gay priest with a partner (formerly married and with two children) has been confirmed in his appointment as Bishop of New Hampshire in the Episcopalian Church of America, and the diocese of New Westminster in Canada has decided that it will bless unions between same-sex couples. There is no possibility now that either diocese will be persuaded to change its mind. In October a world conference of Anglican primates was convened in London to discuss the issue of homosexuality in the church, at which irreconcilable positions were staked out. No irrevocable split has yet occurred, but a historic schism looms.
The liberal wing argue that a quite large percentage of priests are, and always have been, homosexual by inclination; and that their sexuality can make them more sensitive and understanding (because more "feminine" by nature) than the average heterosexual, thus equipping them especially well for their vocation. Being unmarried and free from family obligations, they are also at the disposal of their flocks, in theory, day and night — surely a great asset. That is the theory behind the compulsory celibacy of Roman Catholic clergy. Almost nobody is without physical sexual urges, but it used to be understood that the priestly vocation involved their denial — a heavy sacrifice, particularly in a young man, but one which the whole of society supported. The reward for a priest who was true to his vocation was prestige and a certain personal power (for good) in the community. (A parallel to George Orwell's Animal Farm irresistibly suggests itself — just as, at the end of the story, the pigs have become indistinguishable from the men, so the church may be approaching a situation where it is no longer possible to tell priests apart from sinners.) Jesus had an answer to every problem presented to him, which he usually expressed in a parable of unforgettable beauty and wisdom. He never offered a soft option, so is it conceivable that he would have condoned physical sexuality between men? The symbol of the Christian religion is the cross, on which Jesus suffered an agonising death for refusing to renounce his convictions. His crucifixion, following trial by Pontius Pilate, is the one unchallengeable fact — attested by independent historical evidence — contained in the Creeds. The sacrifice of self has always been the benchmark of the Christian life lived to its logical conclusion, even if it means death (in the modern church think only of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed for taking part in the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler). This may seem an extreme analogy to cases of gay bishops, but those who embrace the Christian "profession" surely know what they are undertaking. This is why the debate around whether it is OK to be openly "gay" and a priest — i.e. to "have it both ways", enjoying the prestige without the sacrifice — sometimes seems to be taking place in a void, the context all but forgotten. What has happened to the idea of vocation?
christopher@hurstpub.co.uk
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