According to homosexual MP, Chris Bryant.

From here:

Anyone who has ever heard Jeffrey John preach, read his poetry or met him knows that he is a man of immense spirituality who should have been made a bishop years ago.

Sadly, the Church of England has got its cassocks so firmly in a twist that it seems completely incapable of coming to the same conclusion, purely and simply because he’s gay.

[….]

But in a classic twist of English logic, the Church still maintains that it’s fine and dandy to be gay just so long as you don’t do anything about it.

Celibacy is the rule – especially for the clergy – as same-sex sex is definitely off-limits.

There are two problems with this. For a start it is a great big lie. It ludicrously pretends that Jeffrey would be the first-ever gay bishop.

But I remember terribly anguished and frighteningly closeted gay bishops in my theological college back in the Eighties. One became quite a close friend, and his relief the moment he retired and took up residence with his lover of 20 years was a sad joy to behold.

And 10 years ago a bishop asked me, in all seriousness, whether it was wrong that he had just decided that he had to appoint a straight man to a particular inner-city parish because literally every other vicar in the area was gay.

There are that many homosexual priests and bishops in the Church of England?

If it’s twisted logic to expect a homosexual priest to be celibate because his condition is a part of his nature, it must also be twisted logic to expect a sinner not to sin because his condition is a part of his nature. Welcome to the Church of Antinomianism.

Jeffrey John was not appointed as bishop of Southwark because he is a homosexual in a same-sex civil partnership; he is now celibate, though that was not always the case.

From here:

The latest evidence of prejudice against homosexual people in the Church of England has come from the leaked Colin Slee memo and advice that Archbishop Rowan Williams sought in order to get around the Equality Act (2010). This counsel was to ensure that a gay man, ie Jeffrey John, was not appointed as bishop of Southwark. A cunning checklist was devised, consisting of five questions:

• whether the candidate had always complied with the Church’s teachings on same-sex sexual activity;

• whether he was in a civil partnership;

• whether he was in a continuing civil partnership with a person with whom he had had an earlier same-sex relationship;

• whether he had expressed repentance for any previous same-sex sexual activity; and

• whether (and to what extent) the appointment of the candidate would cause division and disunity within the diocese in question, the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion.

By my reckoning, Jeffrey John fails on five out of five. One could be forgiven for thinking that this is a list deliberately designed to exclude him.

[……..]

Of course, these questions seem inappropriate, invasive and irrelevant. The sex life of my bishop is of zero interest to me, as long as it attests to the values of love and faithfulness that we expound in the church.

The author of this article, Lesley Fellows is an Anglican priest and makes some interesting points: it does seem that the questions were framed explicitly to disallow John from being appointed bishop. Of course, the questions are only necessary because the Church of England has lost its way and is incapable of maintaining a coherent front when it comes to sex. If there were no actively homosexual priests – and there shouldn’t be – the five questions would never have been asked.

Apparently, Fellows has no interest in the sex life of her bishop, “as long as it attests to the values of love and faithfulness that we expound in the church.” But if Fellows has absolutely no interest in the sex life of her bishop, how would she know that it really does attest  “to the values of love and faithfulness that we expound in the church”? It seems to me that Fellows and, indeed the whole Anglican Church, is exceeding interested to the point of obsession with people’s sex-lives: if men are not allowed to have sex with other men and women with other women, church liberals go into paroxysms of outrage at ecclesiastical injustice, exclusion, prejudice and homophobia.

Never was there a church more preoccupied with sex than Western Anglicanism.