Gay prayer request for Prince George '˜hypocritical'

The comments were made by Scottish Episcopal minister, the Very Rev Kelvin Holdsworth, Provost of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow, in a blog he wrote a year ago. He retweeted the piece once again last week.

The Scottish Episcopal Church voted in favour of allowing same-sex marriages this year.

Rev Holdsworth wrote: “If people don’t want to engage in campaigning in this way, they do in England have another unique option, which is to pray ... for the Lord to bless Prince George with a love, when he grows up, of a fine young gentleman.

“A royal wedding might sort things out remarkably easily though we might have to wait 25 years for that to happen,”

He told the BBC he first wrote the blog post more than a year ago but it gained traction after he retweeted it following the news of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement last week.

He later released a statement distancing himself from his own comments, emphasising he wrote it over a year ago.

“This quote seems to be getting a lot of attention because it was picked up by a number of anti-gay campaigners in the Church of England,” he said.

“It is a shame that the happy news about the Royal wedding has been hijacked in this way ... I’m sorry that something that I wrote has been interpreted in the way that it has.”

But Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen and a Christian Episcopal Church missionary bishop, said the comments were not Christian.

“To use prayer as a mechanism for wishing this on Prince George is an unkind and destructive thing to do,” he told the BBC.

“It doesn’t have the prince’s best interests at heart, but uses him as a gender-political football to please 1.7% of the population.

“What is especially odd and incongruous is the fact that it is suddenly OK to pray for someone to be gay, but totally unacceptable to pray for them to be free from being gay and to resume a sexuality that was in tune with their biology.

“This seems not only contradictory but hypocritical.”

The Church of England declined to comment as Rev Holdsworth is a member of the Scottish Episcopal Church.