The Archbishop of Canterbury resorted to Alastair Campbell’s own communications techniques when trying to explain what is going on in the Church of England over the divisive issue of same-sex marriage.
Appearing on The Rest is Politics podcast this week, Justin Welby told Tony Blair’s old spin doctor that he now has a “better answer” on gay sex and marriage than he did seven years ago, when he told Campbell he was “copping out”.
And certainly it is an answer more in line with what Campbell wants to hear, telling him that “where we’ve come to” is that straight or gay relationships are now fine, as long as they’re “committed”, by which he means a “marriage or civil partnership”.
Welby goes on to claim that he and a “majority” of bishops have “put forward a proposal” whereby people “who have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage” ceremony “should be able to come along to… a church, and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together”.
There’s just one problem with these statements: not one of them is an accurate reflection of Welby’s latest proposals on same-sex relationships. In fact, the proposal that he and the other bishops have set out does not signal they approve of sex outside heterosexual marriage – contradicting what he told Campbell. Neither does it allow for special services for same-sex couples who have got married – again, the opposite of what he said. For one reason or another, Welby has managed to give Campbell and his listeners the impression that the proposed reforms are far more radical than they are.
Last November the latest version of the bishops’ proposals were placed before General Synod, the church’s governing body, and they included a clear statement that “the Church’s doctrine remains” unchanged. “We have been clear that we have no intention of changing that doctrine,” the bishops wrote. “We also note that the Church’s teaching on sexual relations has been treated as being part of the Church’s doctrine of marriage. We are not proposing to change that teaching.”
This is completely at odds with what Welby said on The Rest is Politics, namely that where he and the bishops have now “come to” is that sex in “committed” relationships, whether “straight or gay” is now fine. Did Welby misspeak under pressure? It seems unlikely. Returning to Campbell to discuss this topic was clearly part of the point of going on the podcast and he would have been prepared for his questions. Plus, he gave a similar answer on another recent occasion.
Welby also claimed that under his proposals, “where people have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage… they should be able to come along to… a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together”.
But this, too, is at odds with what the bishops’ actual proposals contain. The proposal presented to General Synod in November is at pains to state that it “intentionally does not differentiate between couples who have and who have not entered into a civil same-sex marriage”. This is because the new prayers (known as ‘Prayers of Love and Faith’ or PLF) “are not being offered to be used as a thanksgiving for marriage or a service of prayer and dedication after civil marriage and do not refer to, or take account of, a couple’s civil marital status”.
In other words, the proposed new services may not refer in any way to the fact that the couple have recently got married – even though that is the reason people want the services in the first place.
What’s more, it’s not even true that the service may be “for” the couple, as Welby tells Campbell. Dancing on the head of a pin to avoid having to go through the full church process of introducing contentious new liturgy, the bishops told the synod that the new prayers (which are definitely not to mark the marriage, honest) may only be included as part of an ordinary extra service and not be a special service for the couple akin to a wedding blessing.
You may marvel at the ingenuity of Church of England bishops, who have managed to try to provide a service to bless same-sex marriages by proposing a service which cannot even mention the fact that the couple are married, may not endorse their relationship and may not even say that it is a service “for” the couple. But, constrained by existing church doctrine and unable to change it (the bishops don’t have the votes), they daren’t go any further.
Why then is Welby giving Alastair Campbell the impression that the changes are much more liberal than they really are? Is he just trying to impress the Rest is Politics audience, or is there something more going on?
Most likely, what he has told Campbell – that the C of E is poised to approve same-sex relationships and hold services of blessing after same-sex marriage, neither of which is true – is much closer to what he and the bishops truly want their proposal to be. It’s what they dearly wish they were about to achieve. But they have been unable to deliver that. So instead they have proposed something much weaker: an ordinary extra service, which may not say it is for the couple or mention they are married and which may not express approval of or formally bless their relationship.
You may wonder what the point of it is then. But in reality the expectation from those on both sides of the issue is that the services will in practice do all the things they are not technically allowed to do: they will be presented as services for the blessing of a same-sex marriage and be treated as such by all involved.
This may be exactly what Welby and the bishops want to happen. They want their modest proposals to be misused in this way in churches, as that is what they really wanted to happen in the first place (at least as long as actual same-sex marriage in church is off the table).
Welby’s mischaracterisation of the new services to Campbell is then most likely a manifestation of this wish for the services to be used well beyond the formal constraints technically imposed on them, constraints which Welby and a majority of the bishops don’t really agree with and wish they had the votes to change.
Neither side of the debate is happy with this state of affairs. Liberals are unhappy that if they use the services in the way they want to – the way that Welby is indicating by his comments to Campbell he is actually expecting them to be used – then they will technically be doing so contrary to what the rules around the services say. They’ve been doing this unauthorised for years anyway; what they were after is for such services to be put on a proper, legitimate footing. But this is not what they’ve got.
Conservatives of course are unhappy that services for same-sex couples are being rammed through in a way that technically may not change the church’s doctrine of marriage but which everyone knows will be used as though the doctrine has changed. Welby’s comments feed straight into this suspicion as they confirm that this is exactly what he and the bishops expect and even intend to happen. They want the public to think these are services of blessing for same-sex marriages, even though in order to comply with church doctrine and get them through Synod (and past the lawyers) technically they have had to characterise them as nothing of the sort.
Rev. Dr. Andrew Goddard, who has served on official working groups reviewing the church’s teaching on same-sex relationships, says that Welby’s characterisation of the reforms to Campbell is “either false or is proof that the argument which was presented to Synod to justify introducing ‘standalone services’ next year… was duplicitous”.
Goddard, a proponent of keeping the church’s teaching on marriage as it is, has demanded an urgent “apology and correction” from Welby. He speaks of “the widespread erosion of trust and growing sense of disbelief, betrayal, deception, anger and despair now felt across much of the Church of England” in relation to the Archbishop and the process he is overseeing.
Welby needs to take care that he doesn’t undermine the trust of all sides in this debate, which is already low. Wherever you stand on the underlying issues, no one wants an Archbishop of Canterbury you can’t trust because he says one thing to Alastair Campbell and another in church councils. No one wants an Archbishop – supposedly a Christian role model – who acts like an underhand politician, twisting truths to get a bill through Parliament and telling the public what they want to hear. Justin Welby might impress Tony Blair’s old spin doctor with his new lines, but he’s impressing nobody else.
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Professor, the thing is – this whole net zero, man-made-climate-change business is not about science. They do not care whether you are right or wrong.
Professor, the whole thing is about power and control.
It’s about you and me and just about everybody else being controlled by a small, elite group of politicians/criminals.
That’s all there is to it.
Marxism wasn’t about the liberation of the proletariat either. It was just a useful ideological tool to acquire total control over the entire population, to the extent where any individual could be summarily executed without any reason.
Nazism wasn’t about the superiority of the Germanic race either. It was just a useful ideological tool to kill as many people as possible – Jews, Germans, Russians, whatever.
Woke isn’t about addressing historical injustice either. It’s just a useful ideological tool to control and enslave people.
Professor, feel free to study the climate if that’s what you enjoy doing, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be done. But be aware of what’s going on, because, I’m sure as a scientist you don’t like the feeling of not knowing what’s going on.
Indeed. “Public health” isn’t about the health of the public either.
”“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Joseph Goebbels
“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” , John 8:32
It sure is a big battle but it is still worth fighting, all is not yet lost.
Indeed.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Matthew 7:16
Fruits of Nazism: Death camps, Europe in ruins, 50 million dead
Fruits of Communism: – Slavery, death camps, 100 million dead
Fruits of wokery: ? We’ll see.
True….They are a threat to all working & middle classes in this country. People need to start resisting this and trying to get the message of what Agenda 2030 is to the wider public. Car manufactures need to show some backbone too instead of asking the Government for clarity in deadlines, like Jews in the 1930s helping the Nazis kill more of them, or Turkeys voting for Christmas.
True major major sir sir, but we don’t need to convince the “elites”(and I use the word advisedly).
We just need to wake up the normies, and we’re getting there.
Faced with serious and increasing pushback the political class’s unity on this question will fracture.
The whole climate change story is a hodgepodge of nebulous theories all of them so vague and unverifiable that they are impossible to prove or disprove.
All climate change predictions are couched in words like could, might, possibly.
And even those are consistently wrong. No polar ice in the summer, Maldives under water. All not even remotely accurate.
The whole thing is just the biggest scam of the last 30 years.
None of this work will be reported in the mainstream
Too many vested and powerful interests hold sway over the MSM.
There are people who are very invested in the Net Zero project, some of whom might even believe in it. But many of its supporters cannot backdown now, no matter what contradictory evidence is presented to them. There are others who are using it to simply control populations. Both petty and serious authoritarians are delighted with Net Zero.
But the ever increasing evidence that challenges Net Zero, cannot be ignored forever. Thus I expect to see a change of tack, away from CO2 as the bogeyman, to a more wooly notion that reducing consumption and consequently ‘saving’ the environment, is good in and of itself.
Levels of CO2 have been much higher in the past, with evidence of vibrant animal and plant life.
Anyone who has seen the destruction left by a herd of elephants munching their way through nature would wonder at how similar numbers of massive dinosaurs could possibly have survived. The answer was, of course, that CO2 levels at the time varied between 1,200 and 2,800ppm, i.e. three to seven times today’s level.
CO2 levels in the Cambrian period 540 million years ago were just under 8,000ppm, i.e. twenty times today’s value.
Temperature data going back billions of years show that average global temperatures have varied by more than 10°C in either direction and that the Earth is currently in one of the coldest periods in its history. No geological period has been as cold as our current period, the Quaternary, for at least 250 million years. (See ‘Inconvenient Facts’ by Gregory Wrightstone.)
Not only that, but CO2 levels are often artificially increased in greenhouses to accelerate plant growth, often done by exploiting the exhaust of gas fired heating.
I don’t like the “trapping heat” explanation of the greenhouse effect. So what if more heat is trapped in the upper atmosphere, why should I care about that on the surface?
A better argument in my view is to consider the energy striking the ground, some (a lot) of which comes from the atmosphere, which is why cloudy nights are warmer than clear ones.
Downwards radiation from CO2 molecules comes from an effective height, below which the infrared photons have a good chance of avoiding absorption before striking the ground. Adding more CO2 must reduce that effective height, increasing (usually) the temperature, giving more downward radiation at the surface.
Hence, saturation is a myth.
Saturation is most certainly not a ‘myth’, if only because it is only a hypothesis, as this article points out:
‘The saturation hypothesis would appear to explain how CO2 has been 10-15 times higher in the past without runaway temperatures, while the anthropogenic warming opinion does little more than provide scientific cover for a dodgy but fashionable extreme eco scare.’
This hypothesis is supported by workings:
‘Diffuse radiation depends on the different absorption bands of carbon dioxide and water vapor, as functions of wavelength, temperature, concentrations or pressure. The predicted results using COMSOL computer code show that the effects of carbon dioxide concentration on ground surface temperature are negligibly small, for example, over a 5-year period.’
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590123024015548
‘We used this setup also to study thermal forcing effects with stronger and rare greenhouse gases against a clear night sky. Our results and their interpretation are another indication for having a more critical approach in climate modelling and against monocausal interpretation of climate indices only caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Basic physics combined with measurements and data taken from the literature allow us to conclude that CO2 induced infrared back-radiation must follow an asymptotic logarithmic-like behavior, which is also widely accepted in the climate-change community.
The important question of climate sensitivity by doubling current CO2 concentrations is estimated to be below 1˚C.
This value is important when the United Nations consider climate change as an existential threat and many governments intend rigorously to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions, led by an ambitious European Union inspired by IPCC assessments is targeting for more than 55% in 2030 and up to 100% in 2050 [1].
But probably they should also listen to experts [2] [3] who found that all these predictions have considerable flaws in basic models, data and impact scenarios.’
https://www.scirp.org/pdf/acs2024144_44701276.pdf
The best way for you to counter that hypothesis would be with your own workings, without which your ruminations, as with so much nut zero nonsense, simply add more hot air……
There seems to be conflicting evidence. So of the science appears to have an almost limitless budget, some of it doesn’t.
However, the simple irrefutable truth is that Mrs Jones the retired shop assistant living in the UK – and all those like her, including you and I, should bare no penalty as no action by us remedial or otherwise could possibly have any effect on Global CO2 or therefore climate change. And as such we are, ruining our economy, and our futures for …nothing.
Their terraforming plans have nothing to do with greenery. They aspire to a sandy desert world where silicon will reign supreme. The real target isn’t carbon dioxide it is carbon generally. If they see you going out for a drive with your big family then they are filled with loathing and homicidal tendencies. You are a vermin problem.
Perhaps someone could letMr Miliband know about CO2. He does not appear to understand the science. Perhaps he should as Zorofessor Willie Soon, an astrophysicist for advice.
Very well written, positively seminal in its field.
William Happer (Princeton) authored a paper published in 2020 on the saturation of the infrared absorption bands for the five most abundant greenhouse gases: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03098#
Its simple, telling to truth doesn’t get you billions of £s, dollars etc, it also doesn’t enable you to control the situation either , but the fact of the matter is, the Truth ultimately will come out and sooner the better in this country, before they either freeze or starve us to death!!.
Chris:
Shame on you for not referencing the original and most quoted paper on CO2 absorption: Wijngaarden & Happer (2002), which also notes that methane emissions are also a non-problem.
It just seems so unbelievable that so many people want to go along with the Net Zero scam, but then you look back to how so many behaved during the Covid period and then you understand and despair of the stupidity of it all
Not surprising as most people still trust the media and government
Nil illegitimi carborundum people.
Merry Christmas. Turn on all the lights.
‘What the scientists are looking at here is the narrow absorption bands within the infrared (IR) spectrum that allow ‘greenhouse’ gases to trap heat and warm the planet.’
I’m not sure Chris is making the saturation point correctly here. Incident solar radiation only in a certain frequency band is absorbed by CO2, and all the incident solar radiation in that band is absorbed by existing CO2. Therefore, additional CO2 produces no additional absorption, because there is no radiation in the pertinent band left to be absorbed.
What about the IR rerediated from the earth?
“studies suggest”? It’s beyond any shadow of doubt.