The UK Guardian:

The Church of England has ruled out offering blessings to same-sex couples, insisting that such public gestures belong only to heterosexualmarriage.

The announcement – made in a report from the church's faith and order commission entitled Men and Women in Marriage – comes weeks after the outgoing bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev James Jones, suggested the church consider blessing gay couples as it should "bless true love wherever such love is found".

The report stresses the church's immutable definition of marriage as "a faithful, committed, permanent and legally sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman, central to the stability and health of human society", but recognises the existence of same-sex relationships, which it terms "forms of human relationships which fall short of marriage in the form God has given us".