Over the past couple of the weeks the UK’s bishops, both Anglican and Catholic, have been bleatingly mightily about the government’s plans to legalize same-sex marriages. Apparently letting a gay or lesbian couple get married is an abomination on a par with abortion and slavery. And what’s more, churches will be forced to perform these marriages, even though they find them morally abhorrent.

Well, actually, no.

The government’s proposals, issued today, make it quite clear that the change in the law will apply only to marriages conducted by civil authorities in registry offices. It will still be illegal for same-sex couples to marry in church. That’s stated clearly by Home Secretary Theresa May here, and by Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone here. And it is set out clearly in the government’s consultation paper here (PDF).

I find it very hard to believe that the bishops did not know that they would be offered this protection. Why would the government not have told them that they were doing this? It has to be a piece of horse trading. And yet the bishops have publicly argued that the government’s plans were exactly the opposite.

Worse still, as this provision is only in there as a sop to the bishops (large portions of their congregations, and even many of their clergy, seem perfectly happy with same-sex marriages), look at the effects. In order to justify their own bigotry, the bishops have persuaded the government to ban all religious organizations from conducting same-sex marriages, whether they approve of them or not. As the Pink News article linked to above notes, many religions, including Quakers, Unitarians, Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism, want to be able to solemnize same-sex marriages, and will continue to be prevented from doing so. Where exactly is the “tyranny of tolerance” in all this?

There are other issues to be resolved as well. For example, the government expects that same-sex couples who previously enacted civil partnerships will want to convert their relationship to a marriage. There will be opposite-sex couples who would prefer to have a civil partnership, which the government does not propose to allow. Hence the need for a consultation period to work out what provisions need to be enacted.

Crucially from my point of view, there should be recompense for couples in which one partner has undergone gender transition. Because of the bishops’ insistence that same-sex marriages are abhorrent, the Gender Recognition Act stipulates that anyone wishing to change gender must end any existing marriage and, if desired, enter into a civil partnership with their former spouse. The government proposals state that this will no longer be necessary, but they offer no recompense to people whose marriages were forcibly dissolved. If they want to be married again, they will have to pay to convert their civil partnership to a marriage. The number of couples involved is not that large, and this seems to me unnecessarily cruel.

It is worth noting that the final legislation will not necessarily reflect the provisions set out in the consultation. We (British citizens) can change things for the better. Equally the bishops and their allies will be clamoring for the provisions to be watered down. Sadly I expect S’onewall to be whispering in the government’s ear that it will be OK to offer a further sop to the bishops by removing the sections relating to trans people. It won’t be the first time that they have presented themselves to government as legitimate representatives of Britain’s trans population while at the same time promoting transphobia within their own ranks.

Further information, including a link to an online response form, is available from the Home Office here. It is important that as many people as possible do respond, because the bishops will be mounting an aggressive campaign to get their side to respond. In particular it is important that non-trans people support the rights of trans people. The trans community itself is so small that if only trans people speak for it their arguments will seem insignificant.

There are some useful ideas for things to say in the consultation here.

Finally I should note that this really is a problem of bishops, not of Christians. I have many Christian friends, including a Catholic Priest, a Methodist Minister and an Anglican Curate. Large numbers of Christians are perfectly OK with LGBT people. Their leaders refuse to accept this, and are doing untold damage to their faith thereby. I wish God would hurry up and drop a clue stick on some of them.