not too much

In The Guardian of 6 March 2004, Canon Marilyn McCord Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, commented on Bishop Gene Robinson's withdrawal from speaking at the Oxford Union debating society because "It would not be in the best interests of the Anglican communion at this delicate moment in its history."

God is Truth. Human attempts to discern truth are fallible and fumbling, but conscientious efforts to strain for it are often rewarded with glimpses. Human sexuality is a deep, poorly understood and under-articulated subject.

. . . But how will removing the causes of the current conflict from view help the church? Does this not come close to suggesting that it is in the interests of the Anglican communion for gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Christians to go back in the closet and stay there?

. . . how can Anglicans who have recognised sacraments of God's love in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered lives find any merit in the idea that it would be in the best interests of the Anglican communion for these Christians to hide their light under a bushel?

The Church does violence to them by pressuring them to split off their vocations as sexual persons from their public Christian lives; it does violence to itself by attempting to atrophy, if not amputate, some of its members. For Anglicans who have seen alternative lifestyles to be good and godly, to share the hope that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons would lie low for a while, is to flirt with Caiaphas's cynical estimate that "it is expedient that one man die for the people".

Read here a sermon preached by Professor Adams at St Matthew's Westminster on 10 February 2004, the night before the Church of England's General Synod debate on Some Issues in Human Sexuality