Marriage Guidance

When the Attlee Government legislated to regulate marriage, it simply presupposed that marriage could only ever be the union of one man and one woman. No one said anything, because it was so obvious.

Of course there have always been other things as well. But they were and are, in the technical sense of the word, deviations. The union of one man and one woman is the universal norm, simply as a matter of fact. Ask yourself why that should be, and what makes us think that we in the Postmodern West are so much wiser in these matters than everyone everywhere else and at every other time.

There is simply no comparison with, for example, interracial marriage, which has never been illegal in this country, and which has only ever been so anywhere if specific legislation had been passed to that effect. By contrast, redefining marriage to include same-sex couples is only legal anywhere because specific legislation has been passed to that effect.

This is one of the three most dramatic and most drastic proposals that Parliament will ever have considered. Ever. It ranks even with the recent legalisation of human-animal hybridity and the recent permission of two persons of the same sex to be listed as the parents on a birth certificate. But is Ann Widdecombe right to call for a referendum? No. We do not need a referendum. We need MPs who will just say no. Even retrospectively, repealing such legislation if it had already been enacted.

With the nature of marriage up for debate, we should seize the opportunity and the initiative.

The extension to relatives of the right to contract civil partnerships, which do not need to be consummated, since not even Tony Blair could devise a way of enabling the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith (the present title derives not from Henry VIII but from Edward VI, and was conferred not by the Pope but by Parliament) to grant Royal Assent to legislation making legal privileges conditional on sexual acts other than that, within marriage, which constitutes the consummation of marriage. The present restriction of civil partnerships to same-sex couples is an expression of triumphalism; it is a way of saying, "We are the masters now".

The entitlement of each divorcing spouse to one per cent of the other's estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, and the disentitlement of the petitioning spouse unless fault be proved, thereby restoring the situation whereby, by recognising adultery and desertion as faults in divorce cases, society declared in law its disapproval of them even though they were not in themselves criminal offences.

The entitlement of any marrying couple to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 as regards grounds and procedures for divorce, and of any religious organisation to specify that any marriage which it conducts shall be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly.

And the statutory specification that the Church of England be such a body unless the General Synod specifically resolve the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses, with something similar for the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.

That would be a start, anyway.