The Church of England’s House of Bishops met to discuss the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project yesterday: that is, the project to change the rules about blessings of single-sex relationships so as to allow stand-alone services (such blessings being currently permitted only as an incidental part of some other service) and, additionally, to eventually open the door to priests being able to enter into single-sex civil unions. 

At yesterday’s meeting the bishops, as expected – although much to the fury of LGBT campaigners – confirmed their decision made in October to mothball the project. Though their precise formal statement has been left until after Christmas, it is now clear that LLF will not proceed in the near future.

Many thinking Anglicans will rejoice. Even in the absence of personal qualms about the morality of gay relationships, LLF would have sat very awkwardly indeed with the (officially unchanged) existing doctrine of heterosexual marriage, which broadly remains that sex in it is all right and intimacy outside it undesirable. Believing six impossible things before breakfast, like the Red Queen, might have seemed easy by comparison. 

Look more closely, however, and the prospects are less comforting. For one thing, the shelving........

© The Spectator