: What did your action in Canterbury Cathedral achieve?
: Our protest helped highlight the fact that Dr Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, supports discrimination against lesbian and gay people. Prior to our protest, Dr Carey had always refused to meet with lesbian and gay organisations, but since our protest he has finally met with the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. So I think it was a very positive catalyst to the opening up of dialogue.
: But whenever you do something like this, isn’t there a danger that you alienate people. I mean, for example, in Canterbury, you interrupted a service, an act of worship. Why not demonstrate outside the cathedral? Why go inside and disrupt what for many people was a sacred service?
: Our protest highlighted the perverted moral priorities of many Christians. They are more offended, apparently, by a brief peaceful protest in a church than by Dr Carey’s opposition to lesbian and gay human rights. The real indecency was not our peaceful protest, but the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury says that gay people are not entitled to equality and fair treatment under the law.
: Well, to be fair to the archbishop, he’s very sympathetic to homosexuality, but he would argue that he is simply applying a scriptural understanding. As leader of the Anglican Church he has to, in his view, interpret the Scriptures in a certain way. It’s nothing personal. The Scriptures do appear to say that homosexuality is not on the same level as heterosexuality. Isn’t your argument with Christianity, if you like, rather than with the archbishop.
: There is nothing in the Bible that condones or encourages discrimination against homosexuals. Even if people think that homosexuality is wrong, it doesn’t therefore follow that they should support the use of the law of the land to deny lesbian and gay people human rights. That is Dr Carey’s policy. He says we’re not entitled to fair and equal treatment with regard to the age of consent, the fostering of children, employment, and marriage. On those four key civil rights issues he says that discrimination is right. Now, if he was saying that about black people, there would be an absolute outcry. He would be forced to resign. He couldn’t get away with it. Because he’s supporting discrimination against gay people, some people seem to think that’s okay.
: But there are verses in the Bible which do indicate that homosexuality is not to be practised, that it is not at the same level as heterosexuality. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying it’s there, and Dr Carey as head of the Church has a problem, doesn’t he?
: The Bible does condemn homosexual acts, but even that is a question of theological debate and dispute. What the Bible does not say is that it is right to sack someone from their job because of their homosexuality. It doesn’t say that in the criminal law gay people should be treated differently from heterosexual people. These are all policies that the archbishop claims biblical and theological basis for, but there is none.
: Well of course, the archbishop himself would deny that, and he is not here to enter into this argument, but can we go back to where your passion for these activities, for this campaigning, and also your engagement with the Church, comes from. I was surprised to find that you had a pretty serious religious upbringing yourself in Australia. What were you?
: I was brought up in a Baptist Church. My family was, and is, very devoutly Christian. They take a view that homosexuality is wrong according to their interpretation of the Bible but, nevertheless, they love me as part of their family, and they also support my campaigning work because they, as Christians, say that there is nothing in the Bible that condones discrimination and therefore it is wrong for the Church to try and use the civil law to impose its morality on everyone else.
: You were a Sunday School teacher, weren’t you?
: Yes.
: And you were clearly a believer then. What made you lose your faith?
: I gave up my religious faith for a number of reasons. Firstly, I was very distressed by the way in which the Church, or some of the churches, were endorsing the barbarism of capital punishment and the genocidal war being waged by Australia and the United States in Vietnam. I was also very angry at the way in which they were taking aboriginal kids away from their parents and opposing aboriginal land rights. And then, of course, when I realised I was gay, I felt furious that my love and commitment to another man could be treated (a) as a sin and (b) as a criminal offence endorsed by the Church.
: But some people would say that’s the institutions of the Church, it’s not necessarily Christianity itself. That’s a reason perhaps for rejecting the Church of which you were a member. Is that a case for rejecting Christianity?
: Well, my first break was with organised religion and then, of course, that break was compounded by, I suppose, growing up in my later teens and coming to a more scientific, rationalist view of the world, whereas I saw religion as being a form of irrationality and superstition.
: So what would you call yourself now?
: I’ve got no religious faith. I’m an atheist.
: And yet a lot of the arguments you put forward seem to be based upon Christian principles. Do they remain? Have you anything left from that period when you were a believer?
: Certainly I believe in the basic philosophy of "love thy neighbour as thyself" and the parable of the Good Samaritan, but I don’t think those values are exclusive to Christianity. They are common to all great religions and, indeed, to the long and honourable tradition of Ethical Humanism which is where I now see myself.
: Can I put a last question to you. Supposing you’re a gay man but you feel you have a calling to be a priest in the Church of England, a Church of England which you believe is still homophobic. Should that person become a priest or not, and what should he or she do?
: The Church of England is an oppressive, homophobic institution. I think that any lesbian or gay person who is a part of that Church, unless they are overtly, actively campaigning to change things, they are part of the problem. They are helping to sustain that historic oppression of lesbian and gay people. I think ultimately it’s got to be their choice but I would hope they would make a decision not to be part of an institution which has for two thousand years persecuted lesbian and gay people. And I’ve got to say that the Bible is to lesbian and gay people what Mein Kampf is to Jews.