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A few weeks ago I was asked to speak in a church where the atmosphere of welcome and the singing was by far the best I have experienced for a long while.

I began by saying,

'It is so good to be in the company of normal people.'

There was a spontaneous howl of laughter and burst of applause... which to an outsider might have seemed strange. It was because most of the people there had known what it was to be considered abnormal. Many of them had been stigmatised in their social life and certainly in their churches for something which, until quite recently, was still regarded as an illness.

It's only 50 years since the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report to decriminalise homosexual behaviour were enacted in parliamentary legislation. But it wasn't until 1992 that the World Health Organisation stopped referring to same sex attraction as an illness.

There were people in that church who were old enough to remember how in the 1950's gay men, prosecuted by the police, were given the option of prison or chemical castration. This was the choice offered to Alan Turing, the man who broke the Enigma code, the man who – as the film The Imitation Game claims – is reckoned to be responsible for shortening the 2nd world war by two years and saving the lives of up to 10 million people. Sadly, Alan Turning took his own life, as did the son of one of the men at this gathering; the boy could not live with the stigma of being gay.

Indeed it's not long since I talked with a young gay man who grew up in a very religious household and whose pious father insisted that he be privately treated by a psychiatrist who administered electro-convulsive therapy allegedly to enable him to become 'normal'. It failed and he was left walking wounded.

There is no evidence in the Gospels that Jesus said a definitive word for or against gay people in committed relationships. One has to go to a small handful of disputed verses scattered through the Bible to find condemnation – and here I acknowledge that for some Christians these disparate verses are indicative of divine disapproval.

What we do see very clearly in Jesus is his loathing of stigmatisation. This is evident in the way he sits beside, touches and is touched by people whose race, occupation or state of mental or physical health has made them the objects of derision. He has no time for the vindictive practice of labelling people as abnormal in preference to celebrating what evidently good and natural within them.

The only abnormal thing about the people to whom I spoke recently was that despite abuse, discouragement, and spurious accusations of guilt, they neither capitulated nor retaliated. Instead, they were proud of the way God made them and meant them to be.

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