Conservative leader David Cameron, who has already apologised for Section 28 and his party’s other ‘homophobic’ policies, has criticised the Church of England over its attitudes to homosexuality, calling for it to accept equal rights for homosexuals.
In his interview with Attitude, a British magazine for homosexuals, Mr Cameron said that ‘our Lord Jesus’ would back equality and homosexual ‘rights’ if he were alive and that the Church should recognise that this is ‘essential’.
When Mr Cameron was asked ‘Do you think the right of gay children to have a safe education trumps the right of faith schools to teach that homosexuality is a sin?’, he said:
‘Basically yes — that’s the short answer to that, without getting into a long religious exegesis. I mean, I think, yes. I think ... (long pause) ...
‘I don’t want to get into an enormous row with the Archbishop here. But I think the Church has to do some of the things that the Conservative Party has been through — sorting this issue out and recognising that full equality is a bottom line full essential,’ he added.
Mr Cameron said that homosexuals should be able to adopt children, and he believed that he could convince even a Roman Catholic Archbishop in Scotland that ‘there are occasions when gay adoption is a perfectly sensible and straightforward thing’.
He said he believed that children did best when there were two parents to help to bring them up and that ‘the ideal adoption is finding a mum and dad, but there will be occasions when gay couples make very good adoptive parents’.
‘So I support gay adoption,’ he said.
Mr Cameron also suggested that immigration rules should allow homosexuals to stay in Britain if their lives would be put in danger were they sent home to countries where they are told to keep their sexuality secret.
Gerald Warner, a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, broadcaster and former policy adviser to a British cabinet minister, wrote about Mr Cameron’s suggestions:
‘Carping critics, bred in a legalistic school of scriptural exegesis, might pose the question: if that is the case, why did our Lord Jesus, when he actually was around, not pursue that agenda? Why did he, for example, tell the woman taken in adultery to sin no more, instead of taking a laid-back, relaxed view of people’s couplings and uncouplings?
‘If the debate were about nuclear weapons, it might plausibly be argued that Christ could not instruct his contemporaries about something they were incapable of envisioning; but surely in 1st-century Judea there must have been chaps of a certain orientation, publicans and sinners who were not as other publicans and sinners, if you get one’s drift – yet he did not endorse or champion their conduct, which was strongly reprobated by Jewish law that, in other respects, he frequently contradicted.’
John Macleod wrote in a Daily Mail article:
‘At a stroke, Mr Cameron had carelessly fed widespread suspicion that he is just another member of an august, centre-Left political class who, on a range of issues – Europe, extreme gay rights, immigration and so-called ‘climate change’ – operate in united and contemptuous disregard for the views of most ordinary people.’
At the end of January 2010, speaking at a meeting with party activists, Mr Cameron said that equal treatment for homosexual people should be ‘embedded’ in the country’s school teaching, and that school children must be taught that homosexuality is normal and that homosexual civil partnerships have as much value as marriage.
(See the CCFON report)