Custom and Practice

Blessings of civil same-sex marriages are just going to take place in the Church of England, anyway. Nor has that body's bishops any power to discipline many, perhaps still most, of those clergy who might choose either to perform such blessings or to contract such civil marriages.

Moreover, and especially if a woman bishop is indeed appointed late this year or early in 2015 (since opposition to same-sex marriage is negligible among the women clergy, who also have a very strikingly high rate of divorce), the Church of England will itself be performing such marriages well within 10 years, and probably within five.

No one will break away. They never do, over anything. The people most likely to do so, relatively speaking, over women bishops are in any case at least among the people most likely to wish to bless or to solemnise same-sex marriages.

There is no need to go back to Henry VIII. There is not even any need to go back to the Lambeth Conference resolution on contraception in 1930.

The Church of England effectively wrote the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, recommending what were to become its contents long before they did so, which was long before mainstream public opinion had become remotely receptive to them. It actively supported the Major Government's 1994 amendments that made divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract.

(David Steel also states frankly that he did little more than write up the reports on abortion by the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church as the 1967 Abortion Act, making it no surprise that they all supported it.)

Neither the Church of England, nor any part of it, is any potential bulwark against the other obvious departure, now that the principle has been conceded, from marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman.

The Anglican Communion accepted polygamy, as a matter of principle and not only of pastoral necessity, as long ago as the Lambeth Conference of 1988. Not that there seems to have been any resistance from anyone or anywhere, but the lead in its favour came from the very African provinces that are now being held up as the bastions of orthodoxy.

Therefore, the liturgies of those provinces include forms for the blessing of "customary unions" and what have you. Well, ceremonies such as that which was performed for the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, and which are routine throughout the land, also fall under that description.

As do the very similar blessings of civil partnerships, which already occur wholly within the approved structure of the Established Church. And as will the blessings of same-sex civil marriages, until such time as the Church of England simply performs such marriages as if the parties were of opposite sexes.

It will certainly do so, very soon, and no one will bat an eyelid when it does.