Some honesty, please

More from the letter of Tom Sutcliffe (a lay supporter of women's ordination) quoted in a previous post [the emphasis is mine) :

...And I absolutely do not want to see the Church of England ending up as a result of our in my view correct determination to include women in the ordained ministry at all levels with an even smaller footprint. I do not want the Church to vote to shrink more, and there is no doubt that the ordination of women has had the reverse effect from what was promised. It has not led to an increase in the membership or effectiveness of our church, however good most women priests have been. The decline in numbers and in status and in the respect in which we are held by ordinary citizens who are not active members has become precipitate...."

"...The assurances given to those in the minority of a traditionalist view are worthless because the Code of Practice, even when it has been set up, will be open to constant revision and will be adjusted when the campaigners from GRAS and Affirming Catholicism have managed to squeeze out of the Church all those people with whom they disagree on this matter and whom they do not think belong within the reformed liberal Anglicanism that they seek. We cannot safely allow a process stretching into the future of continuing ferment and argument about how to accommodate or manage those who cannot accept women clergy. It will be debilitating for the Church and very bad for mission. The Church needs to speak not with one tongue, but with many tongues as it always has. Legalism and intolerance are bad Christianity, but they are what the currently proposed Measure is very likely to increase. We are being told over and over again that provision is being made for those who reject women clergy and bishops. I have to say that this is simply untrue. It is a lie. They have sought arrangements on which they could rely. But instead what they have said they need has been consistently rejected – or, when the Archbishops made some effort to achieve a compromise that would work for them, neither Archbishop managed the process of promoting what they were proposing at all well. That is how we have arrived at this situation fraught as it is with dishonesty and illusion...."

We are being told that one of the great strengths of the soon-to-be 105th Archbishop of Canterbury is the fact that he has had a job in (sic) "the real world" and that, as a result, he will have the ability to see to the heart of some the problems which bedevil us. Perhaps this is one issue which he could address with some urgency - the utter dishonesty which is being spoken at the heart of the legislative process of the Church.