Canon lawyer declares Canada’s same-sex marriage local option invalid

After the defeat of the same-sex marriage vote at the 2019 general synod, the Anglican Church of Canada scrambled desperately to find a way to do the very thing that they had voted not to do. Their ingenious canon lawyer, David Jones, came up with the bright idea that, since the existing marriage canon didn’t prohibit same-sex marriage, there was nothing stopping dioceses performing them. This is known as the local option. The existing canon doesn’t say the ACoC can’t marry someone to a sheep, either, but we won’t go there.

The ever-tenacious Anglican Communion Alliance has enlisted the support of another canon lawyer – Professor Mark Hill from the CofE – to offer his opinion. He says Jones’ memo on the subject is “inaccurate and misleading” and anyone performing same-sex marriages should face disciplinary charges. Duelling canon lawyers.

I admire the ACA for their stamina in resisting the tsunami of heretical tripe erupting from the ACoC but will it make any difference? None whatsoever. If Canadian Anglican clergy admitted that same-sex marriage was not marriage at all, half of them would have to get a divorce.

The document from the canon lawyer can be found here, and a useful summary here.

FOR SOME TIME now several diocesan bishops within the Anglican Church of Canada have been allowing – and even sometimes personally performing – same-sex marriages and have authorized liturgies for such rites. They have based their right to do so on a Memo issued in June 2016 by Chancellor David Jones Q.C., the top legal advisor to the Primate.

Now a top canon lawyer in the global Anglican Communion has filed a 10-page Legal Opinion that not only argues that the Chancellor’s Memo is “inaccurate and misleading” but goes much further, stating that disciplinary charges under Canon XVIII currently could be brought against any cleric who solemnizes a same-sex marriage or any person who purports to authorize a liturgy for such a rite.

7 thoughts on “Canon lawyer declares Canada’s same-sex marriage local option invalid

  1. “I admire the ACA for their stamina in resisting the tsunami of heretical tripe erupting from the ACoC but will it make any difference? None whatsoever. If Canadian Anglican clergy admitted that same-sex marriage was not marriage at all, half of them would have to get a divorce.”

    I shouldn’t put it anything like as high as that. Very many are surely married in the ordinary sense? But I am sure that not all lead regular lives as ‘heterosexuals’, and the support for same-sex ‘marriage’ is largely a matter of the pot’s calling the kettle white. I believe on the basis of my observations and experience in the original renegade diocese that it always has been.

  2. “If Canadian Anglican clergy admitted that same-sex marriage was not marriage at all, half of them would have to get a divorce.”

    I hate to be pedantic, but the word you are looking for here is annulment. Divorce presupposes that the marriage being dissolved was real.

  3. I’m confused. Was Jones around in 2016 saying since it’s not mentioned that same sex couple, they can be, or was that in 2019?? (the first para of the post seemingly conflicts with the first para of the quote.)

    • Jones did write the memo in 2016. You can find it here.

      The marriage canon change was first introduced at the 2016 synod and it needed to pass at two synods – it didn’t at the 2019 synod.

  4. When one jettisons the authority of Scripture, why would we think for a moment that they would have any problem in jettisoning the rule of Canon Law?

  5. Would the strange silence of the ACC Primate re. the CoE Canon lawyers’ legal opinion offered in October, 2020, have anything to do with the seminal, first ‘A Word to the Church’ as set out in the memo of March 16, 2019, pre-dated by the published June 22, 2016 one at issue?
    Did the then Bishop of Huron attend said meeting held at Christ Church Cathedral, Hamilton, at which said ‘Word’ was drawn up?
    The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has yet to ask her.
    In the meantime, she has elected most unlawfully to resort to a non-Communal organization in subscribing her signature to their December, 2020, global/Globalist ‘Declaration’ for Trans rights.
    Who authored that ‘Memo’? The newly ‘Elected’ President of Trans America?

    • Long ago in my dim distant youth I heard this saying, “Christianity will keep breaking out in the Church.” That was a wise word in my view, and may encourage all of us in these very strange times.

      Sometimes the commonsense of worldly people may be the Lord’s way of speaking to His Church. Their commonsense tends to say that yes, ‘orientation’ is changeable, and frequently does change, while no, sex is determined at conception and is immutable in every case.

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