Letter Of The Week: And It's Only Monday!

John Sentamu's patronising and long-winded writing is a mere cloak to disguise his backward and offensive views. He'd have saved a lot of time if he'd simply written "all couples are equal, but some are more equal than others, and that's just the way it is".
Sam Cannicott
London

A letter in The Guardian, written in response to the Archbishop of York's beyond embarrassing bollocksathon on gay marriage, which they ran on Friday.
Another well-known phrase that sums up Sentamu's position is of course; "Separate but equal."
There are three other longer letters in The Guardian going through some of the devils in the details, but I think the one above says all that needs saying.

Archbishop Of York: Mad Thought For The Day

'I will be the first to accept that homosexual people have suffered discrimination and sometimes worse through the decades and that the churches have, at times, been complicit in this. There is much penance to be done before we can look our homosexual brothers and sisters in the eye. But that baleful history does not diminish the need to speak the truth in love.
'I firmly believe that redefining marriage to embrace same-sex relationships would mean diminishing the meaning of marriage for most people, with very little if anything gained for homosexual people. If I am right, in the long term we would all be losers.
'Of course, if someone should ask, "how will my marriage be affected if couples of the same sex can marry?", the answer is: not at all. But let me put the question another way: what sort of a society would we have if we came to see all family relationships primarily in terms of equal rights? The family is designed to meet the different needs of its different members in different ways. It is the model of the just society that responds intelligently to differences rather than treating everyone the same...'

John Sentamu, His Very Holiness The Archbishop of York, The Guardian.

Sorry, it's no good.
I've been struggling with this all day and I still have absolutely NO FUCKING IDEA what he's trying to say.
Not even one single sentence makes sense.
Nope.
Nothing.
Is he speaking in tongues?
Tripping?
Is it a joke?
Satire?
Is it the world's most colossal typo?
A cry for help?
Anyone?

Archbishop Sentamu: Bashing The Bishop

Archbishop John Sentamu receives racist emails after saying ministers should not allow same sex marriage

• Archbishop of York sent 'abusive and threatening' emails

• Cleric said ministers should not overrule Bible by allowing same-sex marriage

The Daily Mail is so loving this story.

It fits into their recurring right-wing riff that it's The Militant Gays who are the intolerant ones, not those nice fluffy Christians who want us to burn in Hell.
However we don't know yet which part of his wide-ranging interview in The Daily Telegraph the "small number" of racist emails were written in response to.
If they were about his opposition to gay marriage, is that surprising?
There are regularly gay racists who leave appalling comments on the messageboards of Pink News and Queerty, for example.
(They appear to leave them, but delete or ban people who are critical of their journalistic standards).
Why does anyone expect that gay men should be the only social group in the history of the world where all its members are free of bigotry?
Yes, even where they've been victims of bigotry themselves.
After all, Sentamu spoke of the racial prejudice he received when he first came to Britain - in the same interview where he made his anti-gay comments.

• If you want to see some real textbook bigotry have a look at the Mail readers' comments below their story...

• There was a protest against Sentamu's comments on marriage equality held outside York Minster on February 1st. Here's a video about it.