Loony Fundie Nonsense for the Masses
« A quick round-up | Main | God is incompetent »
There are a few religious groups that rarely, if ever, feature in the Prattle. Some, seem to think, conspiratorially, that Judaism never features but the responses demonstrate that that is not the case. No, the group that most notably never features here is the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. And today's news demonstrates why: whilst other denominations are spewing out homophobic hate speech, the Quakers have been quietly thinking about it (for 20 years, apparently), and today a decision was made:
This open sharing of personal experience has moved us and added to our clear sense that, 22 years after the prospect was first raised at Meeting for Sufferings we are being led to treat same sex committed relationships in the same way as opposite sex marriages, reaffirming our central insight that marriage is the Lord’s work and we are but witnesses. The question of legal recognition by the state is secondary.
We therefore ask Meeting for Sufferings to take steps to put this leading into practice and to arrange for a draft revision of the relevant sections of Quaker faith and practice, so that same sex marriages can be prepared, celebrated, witnessed, recorded and reported to the state, as opposite sex marriages are. We also ask Meeting for Sufferings to engage with our governments to seek a change in the relevant laws so that same sex marriages notified in this way can be recognised as legally valid, without further process, in the same way as opposite sex marriages celebrated in our meetings. We will not at this time require our registering officers to act contrary to the law, but understand that the law does not preclude them from playing a central role in the celebration and recording of same sex marriages.
News release and background on Committed Relationships paper for YMG09—Quakers In Britain, n.d., but the press release itself is 31st July 2009.
Posted in
Church and State
and
Pooves and closet cases
and
Rare Common Sense
at 21:05. Last modified on July 31 2009 at 21:19.
Permalink to this entry | View blog reactions
2: Posted by 
in reply to this comment from Chris L
August 16, 2009 1:41 AM
| Reply
Ah, thanks. What happened was that I'd hard-coded the URL in the comment, and the Prattle was at at different domain then. The comment has been fixed, and I shall hunt down other such whoopsies soon.
Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—advertising
, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
Allowed HTML: a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ol, ul, li, blockquote, q, pre. If your name has accents in it, I'm afraid you'll have to leave them out for now, as things are a little b0rked. The same applies if you are using a word processor to compose your comment, then copying and pasting the text—either turn off curly quotes and avoid using em-dashes, or edit your comment after pasting to get rid of them. Garbled comments usually get deleted.
August 5, 2009 12:54 AM | Reply
Feòrag, d'ya know that all the internal links on the old Prattle posts are broken now? Probably you do...