Cause still has long way to go, says gay priest

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, in an act of considerable moral courage, Nigel Wright became the first Melbourne Anglican priest to identify himself as gay.

''I came out at a parish council planning weekend when I was priest in charge at Thomastown-Epping. The council said with one voice, 'tell us something we don't know','' Mr Wright recalled.

A quarter of a century on, he says, the homosexual cause has made considerable progress in the secular realm but the ''Holy Spirit is fettered'' in the church, whose influence remains largely ''pernicious''. 

Mr Wright, 64, believes the church remains stuck with a construction of homosexuality as evil that has created suspicion, prejudice, hatred, suicide and even murder.

 

In an effort to overturn that interpretation, he has edited a book, Five Uneasy Pieces, to be launched tomorrow, in which five Anglican scholars look at the key biblical texts usually cited as condemning homosexuality (found in Genesis, Leviticus, Romans, 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy).

''We don't understand the milieu in which these texts were written. It's too easy to say it's about homosexuality because we ought to despise homosexuals. Many are about property rights or hospitality or abuse of power or worshipping other gods,'' he says.

''The church needs to do some serious work on this after the 1998 Lambeth Conference [a 10-yearly gathering of the world's Anglican bishops] when the bishops were sent home to listen. I can't see much evidence that there's been much listening, to their discredit.''

The worldwide Anglican Church has since almost torn itself apart in its fierce divisions over sexuality. Mr Wright thinks it has gone backwards in the past few years but so, he says, has the Roman Catholic Church.

An expert and published author on clerical clothing, he says Pope Benedict's penchant for lace and silk, and even a new fur-trimmed cape, is theological evidence that he is ''on a trip down memory lane'' into theological conservatism.

Mr Wright's father and grandfather were Anglican priests and a forebear, Thomas Herring, was an 18th-century Archbishop of Canterbury.

''It's like going into the family business,'' he says.

It is coincidence, Mr Wright says - but a welcome one - that the book is being published two 

days before the national Labor Party conference in Sydney at which same-sex marriage is expected to be a key debate.

It takes its title from the effect of the five texts - ''uneasy pieces of Scripture for people who are not heterosexual'' - and because the method of interpretation will make some people uneasy, he says.

It is also a nod to gay Australian literary great Patrick White, who wrote Three Uneasy Pieces.

He plans to send his book to some Labor MPs, when he works out which ones. 

Also on his mailing list is the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lilydale Baptist Church minister Matt Glover whose church, The Age reported on Sunday, is in turmoil over his support for same-sex marriage.

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