A clergyman who called the Church of England’s first trans woman archdeacon a “bloke” should not be punished, a disciplinary tribunal has ruled.
Brett Murphy was an Anglican priest when he posted comments to his 14,000 YouTube subscribers in which he commented on the appointment of Rachel Mann as the archdeacon of Bolton and Salford last year.
As reported by the Times, A clergyman who called the Church of England’s first trans woman archdeacon a “bloke” should not be punished, a disciplinary tribunal has ruled. The report continues:
Brett Murphy was an Anglican priest when he posted comments to his 14,000 YouTube subscribers in which he commented on the appointment of Rachel Mann as the archdeacon of Bolton and Salford last year.
At a first hearing last year, the Bishop of Loughborough, the Right Rev Saju Muthulay, rejected the complaint, but the issue was reopened after the original complainant requested a review.
But this week David Turner KC, deputy president of the church’s disciplinary tribunal, ruled that Murphy had no case to answer.
Recommending to Muthulay that the complaint should be dismissed, Turner said that while use of the terms bloke and fella to refer to Mann were “arguably highly insensitive”, they were “not in themselves offensive words”.
Turner referred to the 2022 employment law case in which a tribunal said that Maya Forstater, a researcher at a London think tank, suffered discrimination because of her view that men could not become women.
Turner said that “looking at the overall picture of conduct alleged” in Murphy’s case, “that what was said falls short on the facts of any threshold for further proceedings. It follows that there is, therefore, no case to answer in respect of which a disciplinary tribunal should now be asked to adjudicate”.
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