“We do injury to the children” – a Welsh minister breaks ranks

This April, the Church in Wales voted to make the blessing of same-sex couples a permanent rite in its prayer book, with same-sex marriage due to follow in 2027. Make no mistake about how far this has gone: the church is now led by Cherry Vann – elected Archbishop of Wales in 2025, and living openly in a same-sex civil partnership and reported as the Anglican Communion’s first openly lesbian, partnered primate.

The people redefining marriage are the people running the church – and what they are redefining reaches well beyond them, into every child’s claim on a mother and father. Reverend Jeremy Bevan, a minister inside that same church, refuses to go along with any of it. He sat down with me to say why marriage – the lifelong union of one man and one woman – is worth holding the line for. His full interview is on our YouTube channel.

Bevan outlines the slippery slope towards redefining marriage. He explains that the motion to provide blessings for same-sex couples was “explicitly about a vision of something alongside marriage”. However, once you have conceded that these relationships are valid, it will be argued that the Church needs to just recognise that they are marriages. This trajectory has run its course as proposals will be brought forward in 2027 to allow the Church in Wales to conduct same-sex weddings.

We will be told too few couples are affected to matter. But redefinition was never about numbers; it changes the principle, and the principle governs everyone. Concede it for the few, and you remake marriage for all.

Once a child’s claim on its own mother and father is no longer the point of marriage, that claim is up for grabs – severed by design. We are not talking about the widow, or the single mother holding everything together against the odds. We are talking about a system that builds the loss in on purpose. Through surrogacy, Bevan says “we do injury to the children”, treating them as “lifestyle accessories”. That is the cost of redefinition, and it is paid by the smallest people in the room.

So what does a faithful minister do when his own church surrenders? Many of Bevan’s colleagues have already walked. Whole congregations privately oppose the change but will not say so aloud – “people are cowed, they are afraid to speak”. When the first vote came, his was the only parish willing to put its objection on the record. Bevan is staying, not to make peace with this but to fight it from the inside: “the heretics are wrong and they should leave, not me”.

Coalition for Marriage stands with men like Jeremy Bevan, and with everyone - of every faith and none - who still holds that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and that a child is owed a mother and a father. Send this to someone who has been told this fight is lost. It is not. The institutions may be folding, but the case has not changed and neither have we: marriage between one man and one woman is the gold standard, and we will keep defending it.