Dear Archbishop Sentamu

Dear Archbishop Sentamu,

I read a piece on the BBC today about your opposition to the legal recognition of gay marriage as equal to heterosexual marriage. I would like to pick up on two elements of what you said.

First: that the state ought not attempt to redifine marriage, as doing so would be a dictatorial coercion of language, the social structure, history and tradition.

Secondly: that changes like these taking place were causing black people and members of the white working class to leave the Church of England.

On the first point, I commend you for not arguing that homosexuality is against God, or that homosexual parents would not be properly able to raise children. Your line of attack was one of the more nuanced I have seen. It took me a few moments to consider what problem I had with your argument.

I find it troubling that you are suggesting that black people and working class people will disproportionately be against gay marriage (I infer this from possibility of a Church of England which supports gay marriage being proposed as a cause for the aforementioned flight). This may be true, though it would take a pollster to find out and no poll was quoted. What is troubling for me, however, is that you seem to be denying certain people the potential to have an opinion other than what you have depicted them as having.

In fact there are very many non-white people who are in the middle class, some of whom will have what are thought of as typically middle class views. Indeed there are many people who you would call working class who have what you call middle class views. A lot of these people are young people. These views are not the domain of the middle class at all, they are the domain of people who view those superficially different to themselves in more of a climate of understanding, and less of fear or suspicion. This altered viewpoint is not particular to the middle class at all, but to a particular and growing set of ways of viewing the world. These ways of viewing the world constitute exactly the sort of facts of language, social structure and newly emboldened tradition with which you defend your archaic conception of marriage. As their views make their impacts, they are swiftly informing our shared history as well. Exactly the points that you used to attack state sanctioned gay marriage can be better used to defend it. Sometimes, in the good times, the state acts as a limb of society on behalf of a growing consensus within that society. This would be one of those times. Sometimes the Church ought to do the same, and this is one of those times too.

I end on the implicit analogy which I could not help but see in the article. A certain category of people are denied a certain set of actions because to allow them to do so would undermine an important tradition or part of the social structure (or more fatuously because the arbitrary definitons of the words used to describe those people and actions leads to a particular conclusion). This kind of argument could have been, and indeed was, used to deny certain groups the vote, to retain the practice of slavery, and to justify the subjugation of the continents by Empire. It is an an argument that needs to be heard, but it is not an argument to end arguments. In this particular case, as in some memorable times before, it is wrong.

Big Troublems

Big troublems. Another neologism (shmism), this redundant portmanteau is redundant. Invokes, it does, a certain 'je ne say what?' post-modern/meta-modern/whatever-modern why does everything have to have a prefix now anyway? vibe. Maybe its because nothing is new. Maybe its because we're not very good at thinking about the contemporary – not the modern which apparently took place a few hundred years ago to some other ponies.

But we've got big troublems.

Existing in an apparent ideological void with no positive morality,

we nevertheless strive heroically. Or maybe just watch TV.

All the while whirling in indecision and impotence.

We know there must be something worthwhile in this world, we search desperately for this thing, we hear it calling us, we tell it: “I'm never gonna give you up!” as we face the batterings of repeated failures and entirely figurative broken dreams. Patterns emerge.

I hate metaphors.

People use “rollercoaster”

For every damn thing.

And so we brave the snowstorm, hoping that out of chaos some order might arise. Patterns emerge. Or just something to hang onto. Humbled, we accept that this world is defined by its complexity, and settle with the bittersweet prize that if we work hard and play nice we might just understand a little more than we did when we were born.