When you take away abortion and LGBT+ rights you weaken society

I could easily have started this piece by quoting Mick Lynch, the tour de force through our media over the last few days. He exemplifies all I’m about to say (see the end of this piece).

However, I feel there is a truth in fiction and culture that speaks to us in a voice we can feel before we can comprehend its truth.

The strawman of the bigots; reducing rights to strengthen communities is a backwards idea

So I’m starting with a Bristol-linked movie set in the West Country. And I’m specifically looking at a bromance because of the comments on same sex marriage made by Hope Chapel’s pastor, Alice Bond.

Hope Chapel, in Hotwells, is the mayor of Bristol’s, Marvin Rees’, own church. He last gave a talk there in March 2021.

The pastors Alice and Chris Bond are both on the Western Harbour Advisory Group as one of the only resident representatives, the other being the chair from the Cumberland Basin Stakeholder Group (of which I am a member). No elected representatives are allowed to join the group.

In a sermon on Sex, Sexuality and Gender, Alice Bond says that she interprets certain teachings to say that “sex between two men or two women is a violation of design and doesn’t point to Christ and the church.”

She goes on to say:

“When a man and a man or a woman and a woman have sex, however monogamously, faithfully, mutually their context is, they do not become one. They remain two distinct units.”

“They may be described as married by certain cultures but before God they are not, as they remain two distinct units. Their lack of union means they do not point to Christ and the church. Marriage is by the very meaning of its root, union. Two becoming one. And this is only possible between a man and a woman.

Chris and I, therefore, would not bless same-sex unions because we do not believe they are a union.”

…

We believe marriage is uniquely between a man and a woman.”