Sorry, I’ve misread the news item. Or else I’m displaying prophetic powers. Most likely, both.
His Grace’s valiant efforts to admit women anywhere they wish to go, including places they hadn’t wanted to go until his valiant efforts began, haven’t quite extended to men’s loos yet.
However, dusting my crystal ball off, I can just see the Archbishop in the near future, explaining his self-admittedly “somewhat controversial” campaign:
“We are all equal before God, brothers and sisters.
“In God’s eyes there is no difference between, say, a shifty oil trader and a saintly Anglican prelate, between a person who says ‘lavatory’ and one who says ‘toilet’, between a righteous and self-righteous liberal man, sorry, person and a revolting conservative sinner.
“And especially there is no difference between male and female persons, at least none that I have so far been able to discern even with God’s help. And yet throughout history female persons have suffered egregious discrimination.
“Even Christian churches are guilty of this outrage. They haven’t allowed female persons to become monks, friars, priests or – until now – Archbishops of Canterbury.
“As you know, I have reversed all those millennia of injustice by insisting that henceforth female persons will be consecrated as Anglican bishops. Thank God for this. Alleluia!
“Yet some injustices still persevere in the lay world. Some grave sinners still bar female persons from half of the world’s public toilets (as we must call those facilities in deference to our underprivileged brothers and sisters).
“The prominently displayed letters M and W, or their pictorial equivalents, are offensive symbols of injustice. They symbolise the oppression of female persons in the same way in which the swastika once symbolised the oppression of persons of the Jewish persuasion.
“Therefore I am declaring that henceforth I shall be boycotting all public toilets that insist on discriminating against female persons.
“And I shall bear any ensuing discomfort with the same fortitude and stoicism as that displayed by Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley and other Anglican martyrs. Like them, I am prepared to make sacrifices for my deep Christian convictions.”
Pushing the crystal ball aside and turning instead to the morning papers, I discover that, though not yet going quite as far as my fortune-telling appliance predicts, Archbishop Welby has made a significant step in that direction.
His Grace is withdrawing his membership from Travellers, one of Pall Mall’s most venerable gentlemen’s clubs. He’s taking this drastic measure in protest against members’ having voted against admitting women in any capacity other than guests.
This raises a number of interesting questions, such as why His Grace chose to join the club in the first place, all those years ago.
At that time the issue of female membership had neither been put to a vote nor even discussed. And yet Bishop Welby, as he then was, grudgingly agreed to rub shoulders with such outrageously anachronistic members as the Duke of Edinburgh.
This can only mean that the Archbishop, as he now is, has changed his views, just as one of his predecessors has rethought the issue of bumping off frail crumblies.
It’s good to see that our prelates refuse to sink into the morass of complacency signposted by calcified attitudes. Like all spiritual people, they develop, inching closer and closer to the ultimate truth, in this instance that the W is but the M tipped over.
I for one am looking forward to the time when Justin Welby delivers the speech I saw refracted through my crystal ball.
Meanwhile, we should ponder the issue of gentlemen’s clubs, which has long been exciting the flaming consciences of those who have little else with which to occupy their minds.
Mostly these are the same people who feel that the elderly should be culled when they become a burden to the NHS, that any combination of mammals should be allowed to marry and that a foetus isn’t a human being but something akin to a benign tumour.
A private club is just that, private. Hence its status is closer to a private residence than to a neighbourhood social.
Just as you and I haven’t yet been told whom we may or must not invite to our homes, no one has the right to tell members whom to admit to their club or not, as the case may be.
The only reasonable, legal or indeed sane way of protesting is not to join a club whose admission policy one finds objectionable.
For the government to enforce egalitarian measures at that level is fully tantamount to, say, prosecuting you for not having invited so-and-so to a dinner party.
An exclusive Muslim club is entirely within its rights to exclude Christians, a Christian club to exclude Muslims, or either of them to exclude Jews. The outcasts can then form their own clubs, admitting or not whomever they like. It’s no one’s business but their own.
Fair enough, His Grace hasn’t yet called for legislation banning gentlemen’s clubs – so far he has left that to others, whose take on such matters is the same as his own.
But his institutional position gives any such pronouncement a weight comparable, if not exactly equivalent, to a state diktat. The Archbishop is after all also a member of the House of Lords, and one who can lay a legitimate claim to a higher spiritual and moral authority than any other member’s.
Are you getting the impression that the good prelate is a professional wrecker infiltrated into the Church hierarchy for subversive purposes? If you are, banish that thought.
He is merely a quintessentially modern man, whose mind has been replaced with knee-jerk Pavlovian instincts and attitudes. Just the man the Church needs to give it a gentle push as it’s teetering at a precipice.