"When I returned home from Dromantine I found an email awaiting me from Richard Nolan of West Palm Beach, Florida - a friend of mine though we have never met. It proudly announced that he and his partner Robert Pingpank had just toddled down to the local city clerk's office to be the first to put their names on their local authority's domestic partner's register.  Approved on Valentine's Day 2005, the register gives partners the same hospital visiting rights as married couples and medical, emergency and funeral consultation rights too. The two men have been together for 50 years now and both are in their late sixties: 'It's finally official. This is the first legal document we have that says we're connected. It's an incredible change for us,' said Dick.

 

"Nolan has been an Episcopal priest - latterly a canon - all his working life. He is not the only one. Is the Anglican Church now saying that his life would have been better if he and his partner had never met? Is it prepared to break up in recrimination and anger over such men as this?"

 

from Stephen Bates, A Church At War: Anglicans and Homosexuality (updated version, 2005), pp. 308-9.