Decline and fall – the last days of marriage
by Simon Caldwell, TCW:
SOMEWHERE in my distant memory I recall how about 20 years ago an agitated young man in the audience of a TV politics show asked Oona King, then the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, when her party would get around to abolishing marriage. She appeared surprised but explained that New Labour had no plans to abolish marriage because it was very popular with the British electorate.
That task was left therefore to the next lot of neo-Marxist revolutionaries, the coalition government of David Cameron, a decade later. Perhaps also conscious that marriage was popular, they relied on the support of Labour to push though the 2013 Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. They did so without a manifesto pledge and against the wishes of the parliamentary Conservative Party and rank-and-file members who left in droves, attracted back by the offer only of a referendum on membership of the European Union, a gamble which backfired spectacularly for Cameron and his cronies.
The Act redefined marriage to make it juridically equivalent to radically different unions so that everyone could enjoy the rights of marriage conferred by previous governments upon heterosexual couples who made a public commitment to one another before carrying out the tremendous responsibility and burdens of raising the next generation.
Same-sex unions are closed to procreation without third-party involvement and therefore are not like marriage. This issue came up during the passage of the Bill. Whereas a child is capable of understanding how a marriage between a man and a woman is consummated by the act of vaginal intercourse, the same question, when made of same-sex couples, tied even the most astute adult legal minds in knots. At what point is a marriage between two men consummated? What about two women? Many differences flow from sexual complementarity, or lack of it, besides the creation of families. There is also the creation of radically different lifestyles.
All this was brushed aside by Theresa May, then Home Secretary, who declared to the Daily Telegraph that the change in the law would mean ‘homosexuals will be missionaries to the wider society and make it [marriage] “stronger”.’
The only robust sociological evidence presented to the House of Commons predicted the opposite, however. A 22-page paper submitted to MPs by Dr Patricia Morgan, a distinguished sociologist and author, warned that the redefinition of marriage would undermine the institution by reinforcing the idea that marriage is irrelevant to parenthood. It contained a detailed analysis of trends in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Canada and some US states where same-sex marriage had been already legalised, and it showed how traditional marriage in such jurisdictions was in freefall.
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