Bishops act the bully in parliament

From The London Guardian-

It is more than 170 years since the Church of England was last able to dictate as to who presided at weddings in this country. In 1836, to much Tory and Anglican grumbling, Protestant Nonconformists were given the chance to celebrate the happiest day of their lives in their own chapels, rather than be forced to resort to an Anglican service in an Anglican church, and civil marriage was recognised in English law.

At the present day, certain of the bishops of the C of E don't seem to have noticed that it is not 1835. On 25 January 2010, a group of bishops in the House of Lords led by the bishops of Winchester and Chichester scuppered an amendment to the equality bill which would have allowed three specific faith communities, Liberal Judaism, Quakers and Unitarians, to register civil partnerships on their own premises. These three religious groups, after much discussion (and of course, prayer), had each independently decided that they wanted to take this step, as part of their commitment to their religious life and as an expression of their communal belief – but my Lords the bishops took it upon themselves to decide for Jews, Quakers and Unitarians what they should believe and practise. Never mind what these non-Anglicans think, they proclaimed, the amendment was the thin end of the wedge, and soon Anglicans would be forced to do the same sort of thing willy-nilly.

Quite apart from the fact that this group of bishops did not actually represent anyone in the Church of England other than themselves, their action was bizarrely inconsistent with what the same bishops had just secured for their own church. They had led the defeat of a government proposal to limit the space within which religious bodies may be exempt from anti-discrimination law. They had said that this was a matter of conscience, of the church's spiritual independence. It was hardly any time at all before the same Lords Spiritual were denying spiritual independence to other religious bodies who were seeking to find legal recognition solely for their own practice. That seems to me a bit rich. Luckily on 2 March the Lords have a chance to think again and think more logically, since Lord Waheed Alli is proposing to re-present the amendment that Winchester and Chichester helped to kill last month.

More here-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/24/equality-bill-bishops-civil-partnerships