Marriage Guidance

Even in Northern Ireland, the state school RE and collective worship arrangements are going to have to be completely rewritten because the Supreme Court had found that they did not meet the needs of the third, third, of children from non-Christian homes. If the Democratic Unionist Party, whose organisational even if no longer necessarily its electoral base is not even in the three transferor churches, thinks that it can retain any democratic right to the Education portfolio, then it had better start importing its brethren, whom it has always struck me never did move to Northern Ireland.

But culturally Anglophile, if by no means always politically pro-British, though it was, and capable of paying for its own transport and accommodation, would the WASP elite on two or more other continents be large enough to rescue a Church of England that now performed only one in 10 of the opposite-sex marriages on its territory?

Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated couples. But now that they are available to opposite-sex couples, then divorce can and should be made far more difficult, since anyone who had not wanted that could always have had a civil partnership instead.

Any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce. Entitlement upon divorce should in any case be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved.

Furthermore any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses. There should be similar provision relating to 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.