© Screenshot Archbishop of Canterbury
Justin Welby spoke at the opening of the Evangelical Alliance on Wednesday. During a question and answer session after his speech, the archbishop was asked why he voted against same-sex marriage legislation.
"What I voted against was what seemed to me to be the rewriting the nature of marriage in a way that I have to say within the Christian tradition and within scripture and within our understanding is not the right way to deal with the very important issues that were attempted to be dealt with in that bill," he replied.
"The bill was clearly, quite rightly, trying to deal with issues of homophobia in our society," Welby continued."As I said at the time in the House of Lords, [...] the church has not been good at dealing with homophobia - it has at times, as God's people, either implicitly or explicitly supported it and we have to be really, really repentant about that because it is utterly and totally wrong."
Welby said he didn't support same-sex marriage, but he warned the Church's view was quickly becoming out of touch.
"We have to face the fact that the vast majority of people under 35 not only think that what we're saying is incomprehensible but also think that we're plain wrong and wicked and equate it to racism and other forms of gross and atrocious injustice. We have to be real about that."
Watch listen to audio, uploaded to YouTube, below:
Reader Comments
... The C of E is dropping the bible at last.
Anyone believe a dogma founded on lies. How can a so called spiritual teaching exclude whole rafts of people simply because they don't believe or behave the way they have been programmed.
How can one rewrite the nature of marriage, seems to me what we consider marriage today is a gross misrepresentation of an ancient sacred ceremony that has been lost in the mists of time. All it is focused on at this time is a sexual union between two people. Surely there is more to marriage than this.
I find it interesting that this 'man of the cloth' didn't mention the child molestation/rape issue that is running rampant for centuries in the Church. Is that being 'in-step' or not? Does the Truth ever really go out of fashion?