Archbishop Aspinall Takes An Easy Way Out

IF the appointment of a female "bishop" in Western Australia and the naming in 2006 of priestess Katharine Jefferts Schori as "primate" of the Episcopal Church weren't sufficiently compelling signs, Brisbane Archbishop Phillip Aspinall's decision to undermine one of his own schools on the subject of gay partners and school formals shows the rot has not only set in but is now virtually the Anglican norm. Senior staff at the straight-laced Anglican Church Boys' Grammar School in Brisbane had insisted their charges take a member of the opposite sex to formals after being asked by several students if they could instead be accompanied by their same-sex "partners." The acceptability of this in state schools, predictably, has already been sanctimoniously acknowledged - pursuant to equal opportunity legislation. In Church schools, for reasons that should be obvious, it's a different story.

Aspinall has cleverly but disingenuously avoided the matter of sexual preference per se, preferring to frame his response in terms of boys taking "friends" who are boys and girls taking "friends" who are girls. Clearly, though, what has been proposed at 'Churchie' (the Brisbane school's sobriquet) is not some Hoover and Tolson or Ernie and Bert model of no-questions-asked companionship but the acceptance of homosexuality itself as a morally equal orientation. However much Christian schools do and should love gay students as cherished sons and daughters of the Father, this they cannot - or, rather, should not - do. Contrary to Scripture and Tradition, such a capitulation to the dictatorship of relativism would be a betrayal of their mission itself. Archbishop Aspinall - president of Churchie's governing council! - has responded to this with a weak disregard for the truths in question.