Loving marriages

I AM a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church and was for many years a police chaplain. In that time I remarried divorcees, blessed and baptised children born to married and non-married couples, blessed same-sex unions and buried those who had died while in active service and the deceased of their families.

It has always struck me that the Holy Spirit of God is present in all those occasions, as in each event the focus was the love that people have for one another.

It is absurd that I can marry women to men and that is given recognition by the state, but when a loving couple of the same sex ask me to preside at and bless their civil partnership; I am prevented. This is neither just, nor right nor holy.

As a priest I exercise my ministry guided by my conscience and Scripture, tradition and reason. Scripture has much to say about condemning divorce and the remarriage of people who are divorced, but still I may remarry divorcees.

Scripture has nothing to say about blessing a loving relationship and giving that partnership social and divine recognition. Right thinking would direct me in all integrity to be able to undertake this action on behalf of the Church, the State and a wider society.

On a significant number of times I have blessed couples after their civil union, and that blessing is about naming the presence of love and the role of the God of Love in their relationship. I hope that the Scottish Government will see this growing tradition and reason too, and as an act of justice enable me to preside over the union of any two persons, regardless of sex, class, ethnicity, to be able to function for LGBT couples in the way I do for straight couples – those of faith, those of none and all those in-between.

Father Ross K Bell

Colonsay Close

Edinburgh

PAUL Brownsey (Letters, 9 September) suggested that gay “marriage” will not undermine marriage in general.

Gay “marriage” is generally only introduced in countries where marriage is already not highly valued, as indicated in low marriage and high cohabitation rates.

Disregard for the importance of marriage correlates with approval of gay “marriage” because it is part of a philosophy that denies the centrality of stable family structure with child rearing by biological parents. It is this wider liberal agenda that undermines marriage and harms society as a result.

Richard Lucas

Colinton

Edinburgh