New Equalities Minister Pushing for Gay Marriage

The Telegraph reports that homosexual couples could be allowed to “marry” in traditional religious ceremonies for the first time, a government minister has said. I told you Lynne Featherstone would be one to watch, but then, I suppose that anyone with the 'equalities' portfolio is bound to have Peter Tatchell's latest slogans ringing in their ears every time policy decisions come up for debate.

The article reports that...

Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister, said the Coalition was considering allowing same-sex couples to include key religious elements in civil partnership ceremonies.

In a parliamentary answer, she disclosed that homosexual couples could be permitted to use “religious readings, music and symbols”. This would make civil partnerships practically indistinguishable from traditional weddings as Parliament recently removed the bar on same-sex unions in churches and other places of worship through an amendment to Labour’s Equality Act.

The proposals will delight equality campaigners who believe civil partnership is a “second-class” status, but they prompted fierce opposition from mainstream Christian leaders who believe marriage can only take place between a man and a woman.

Is it me or is there something vaguely humourous about this picture (left). Boris Johnson is doing a kind of Mona Lisa thing. You look one moment and he appears at ease and in agreement and look again and he looks a bit naffed off.

Religious readings during gay marriages, eh? Gay couples wanting to 'marry' in 'traditional ceremonies' will be hard pushed to better this reading during their ceremony...

Reader/Minister: 'A reading from St Paul's Letter to the Romans...

'For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them.

(Cough) This is the word of the Lord.'

Response (All): 'Thanks be to God.'