George Pitcher is a liberal Anglican priest who writes for the Telegraph and doesn’t believe in the devil in spite of living in the country that produced the Guardian.

He rightly points out that equality legislation doesn’t work and, ironically, can penalise Christians who hold that every individual is equally loved by and valuable to God:

This Government has never learnt that you can’t legislate for equality and freedom. You can pass laws that protect people from specific harm. You can make it illegal to do harm to others or to their property. But fuzzy, feel-good laws, under which we’re generally enjoined to be nice to one another, are too easy to draft and dangerous to implement.

There’s a delicious irony in equality being thrust upon the household of faith. Because equality before God, all humanity being created equally in the image of that God, a God, as we say, who “has no grandchildren”, is a central tenet of the Christian faith. For orthodox Christians, equality really is not the issue. For them, gay people are equally loved of God; it’s their homosexuality that is sinful in that it is contrary to God’s will. For Catholics, women are every bit the equals of men, indeed they often seem to be venerated above men; it’s their supposed exercise of fatherhood that is an abomination.

Luckily, just as I was getting the uneasy feeling that I was about to agree with an entire article by George, to my relief, he came up with this:

As it happens, I don’t believe there are theological, scriptural or ecclesiological grounds for barring women or homosexuals from priesthood or bishoprics, any more than there is a case for barring newspaper columnists from them.

The bible makes the case for the first barring, and Pitcher himself makes the case for the second.