Peter Tatchell, the veteran gay rights campaigner, was invited to speak at Liverpool Parish Church in late October. There he encouraged clergy to engage in civil disobedience by officiating at same-sex blessings and marriages.
He suggested that, in opposing same-sex marriages in church, the Anglican leadership was ‘echoing the past opposition’ to interracial marriages.
GAFCON, he said, ‘seems obsessed with the sex lives of LGBT+ people’. He also argued that evangelical Anglicans’ demand for religious freedom was, ‘in fact, a call for the right of homophobic Christians to discriminate against their LGBT+ brothers and sisters.’ He went on to say: ‘It’s somewhat ironic that LGBT+ campaigners … consistently defend Christians who are persecuted in countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but the people in GAFCON show no reciprocal concern about the persecution of LGBT+ people in … states that still criminalise same-sex relations.’
