The Peacock 27

 "The problems with father Griffin continued for another seven years.  I tried to talk to the rector about him, but he simply shrugged it off.  it turns out that they were both gay, like a lot of high Anglicans, and were more interested in protecting each other than cleaning out corruption.  And I understand, because they both come from an era when it simply wasn't safe to be an out gay man in Christian ministry.  By the same token, they also used this protection as a convenient cover for letting them get away with all kinds of excesses.  And it turned out that a lot of young guys who had visited the church simply didn't want to come back, because they were quite sick of being slobbered over by Griffin.  He was pretty disgraceful.  But this was also during a time when there was a strong push in the Anglican Church for legitimizing gay unions, and in the case of marriage, even if I struggled about it at first, I came to accept it as something wise and necessary.  But others seemed to use this as an excuse for proceeding with such licentious behaviour as would certainly not be accepted between Christian heterosexual men and women, and for the same reason, neither was sexual license to be accepted between Christian gay men...or women.  But they were painting everything in broad strokes of black and white, so if I were to call some dude in the choir on sexually objectifying a young man in the congregation, he'd simply freeze me out of his social circle then warn everyone in the parish that I was a dangerous homophobe, and everyone would cluster round him to defend and protect him from my pernicious gay-bashing."

Carol says, "What do you mean, Aaron, by sexual licentiousness and objectifying?"

"I'm simply taking a feminist reading on the way gay men, or men in general, tend to conduct their sexuality.  Promiscuity is pretty rampant among gay men, and a lot of them simply have no concept of monogamy, not even if they are Christians in the church, and this is problematic, since this is not acceptable behaviour in men towards women, neither should it be acceptable between men.

Carol asks, querulously, "But isn't our sexuality a gift?"  

"And that, my dear, I am not going to dignify with a reply."