Anglican Communion News Service

(CT) Those who disagree with ordaining practising homosexuals should not oppose those who do agree with it, the Bishop of Edinburgh, the Most Revd Richard Holloway, has said.

In an interview published in the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement's spring newsletter, the Bishop, the Most Revd Richard Holloway, says, "I would not force people to accept my attitude, for instance, to the possibility of ordaining gay people in stable sexual relationships. If they say, "I just can't get my head, and my heart, and my mind round it,", then I say, "Peace.

"But please do not oppose those of us who can get our heads, and our hearts, and our minds round it. Let's try and live in some kind of balance here."

And I think one of the ways social evolution happens is by precisely reaching that kind of tolerance.

The Bishop, who is Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, predicts that the Lambeth Conference this summer will achieve a "holding operation, in which we will appoint some kind of long-term study group to look at the issue, which might be the very best thing".

He would welcome as a result the setting up of a "genuinely representative commission that included gay people, gay theologians, some of the more fluent and open-minded conservative theologians", he said. But it would have to exclude "the absolute intransigents, because they by definition don't think there's anything even to negotiate".

There was "nothing really in scripture about the gay issue", the Bishop said, "but it is a big issue for people who have almost absolutised scripture."