The Most Rev Justin Welby made the remarks at the opening of a new headquarters for the Evangelical Alliance in London. While insisting that the decision to oppose equal marriage for gay couples was the right one, the Archbishop said that the Church was ‘deeply and profoundly divided’ over the issue of homosexuality and that homophobia was damaging the Church’s witness, saying that people did not want to ‘hear about a faith that is homophobic’. The Archbishop said: ‘The Church has not been good at dealing with homophobia...in fact we have, at times, as God’s people, in various places, really implicitly or even explicitly supported it.’ The Evangelical Alliance, which was hosting the Archbishop, has been a strong opponent of the government’s Same Sex Marriage Act.
