On May 20^th and 21^st the British House of Commons continues consideration of the Same Sex Marriage Bill which would oblige the state to award a certificate of marriage to two people of the same sex who wish to have it.  There are literally tens of thousands of books in the English language on marriage in addition to the statutory provisions of the Marriage Act 1823 and subsequent Acts in 1929 and 1931 which carefully define the prohibited degrees of affinity (e.g. between a man and the daughter of a deceased wife’s brother or sister).  In none of these publications is there the slightest indication that a certificate of marriage could be envisaged, let alone given, to two people of the same sex.

Marriage in other societies

In pre or non-Christian societies: Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Asian, native American, with or without polygamy, and in African tribal marriages right through to the present day – there has never been the slightest idea that marriage sanctified by the tribe or society ever contemplated what until the last 10 years would have been seen as a patent absurdity even in Western society, namely same sex “marriage”.

Parliaments cannot make the impossible possible

Parliaments in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, France now, may have legislated for the state to issue marriage certificates to homosexual couples, but that does not make them married.  Parliaments can pass laws declaring that the pound sterling or the American dollar are worth so many grams of gold (the Gold Standard), but that cannot ever now be true again, any more than Mao ze Dong’s edict that red should be for “go” and green for “stop” on Chinese traffic lights and state documents, could be made “true”.  The universal view that red is for danger duly prevailed in China after a week or so of chaos in the streets.

Many parliaments in the Western world have legislated for a form of homosexual partnership labelled Civil Partnerships or such like.  In the UK these have been given the same rights of inheritance of a partner’s assets on death as exist for married people.  Whether there are the same affinity barriers as for married people (e.g. a man or woman with the brother or sister of a deceased partner is not clear in all the jurisdictions in which Civil Partnerships have now been instituted.

It is in fact within the powers of parliaments to pass laws about any form of partnerships – business and social.  What is not within a parliament’s powers is to pass laws contradicting the laws of nature (e.g. the laws of motion, or gravity) which is what the bill before the British parliament purports to do.

Damage done by Make-Believe

Any arrangement which confers a title or qualification on a group who are not qualified to be awarded the title or qualification is make-believe  and damages all those that are properly qualified.  Giving out medical certificates to people who haven’t passed their exams does exactly that: it devalues properly awarded certificates in the eyes of the rest of society.  That is precisely what the same sex marriage bill, if passed into law, will do.  In particular it will damage marriage in the eyes of young people, many of whom have doubts about its worthwhileness as it is.

Why is there such a push to make so called “gay” marriages legal when there are so few homosexuals in the British population?[1]

Many have asked this question.  The answer from its supporters is that it is a matter of “equality” or in the words of the Times of London (March 5^th 2013) it would “extend the sum of human happiness”.  “The happiness of whom?” many will ask.  The true answer is that homosexual activists see the marriage badge as validating their claim to be seen as completely normal which is what they desire above all else.

Polls on same-sex marriage are deeply flawed

Recent polls show a small majority of those asked to be in favour of the Government’s Bill, 55 : 45 of those expressing a view (83%).  To assess the significance of this it is necessary to understand how such polls are carried out.  First, they don’t separate out the views of those most affected, i.e. those who are or have been married (about 70% of the British population over 18 (36 million)).  Second, the polls are telephone interviews where the intonation of the question can give the interviewee a pretty good idea of the answer favoured by the questioner – usually in the 18-34 age group which contains only a minority of married people.  Third, interviewees are given little time to consider their answers.

Fourth, unbelievable as it would have been thought only 20 years ago, homosexual agitation from the metropolitan media has made it deeply unfashionable in some quarters to oppose homosexual “equality” in all facets of society, even where – as in the institution of marriage, it clearly runs against the facts of biology and its practice can be medically harmful.  Homosexual activists have even imposed a word “homophobic” on the language to describe those who question claims to this equality[2].  When asked in a poll either face to face in the street, or over the telephone,  many people are afraid of appearing “old-fashioned” even to a stranger and tend to give the “fashionable” view.

Fifth, the question is completely unsymmetrical.  It’s like asking people if they are in favour of higher taxes to pay for better social services.  Many will say yes on the assumption it doesn’t apply to them!  There is in fact one and only one way to get a representative sample and that is from written answers composed in the privacy of one’s home and sent for counting to an organisation independent of the pollsters like the Electoral Reform Society.

Many of the 36 million married people are evidently deeply upset by the notion of marriage certificates being handed out to homosexual couples.  The only genuinely scientific estimation of the number of homosexuals (female and male) gave 1.3% of the adult male population and 0.6% of the female – about 500,000 in the British population[1] of which only a fraction are said to care about marriage.  Most of these are concentrated in the casta: the London political, media and arts fraternity (see Metrosexual Preoccupations).

The Cameron-led government is therefore attempting to overturn millennia of mores and upset millions of people for the sake of at most about 0.4% or 1 in 250 of the population.  One estimate shows that about 1300 English statutes would be affected by the need to replace “man and woman” when referring to the married state.

Will the passing of the Same Sex Marriage Bill for this tiny minority remove pressure on the rest of society?

The evidence from the USA is that it will not.  Indeed encouraged by its “victory”, homosexual activism is likely to increase, certainly in the field of education (e.g. see the “Homosexual Agenda” by Alan Sears and Craig Osten, published by Broadman and Holman in 2003).  For this reason a new clause (no. 5) to the British bill has been tabled for Monday’s and Tuesday’s debates.  This clause seeks to protect people like marriage registrars, who have a conscientious objection to same sex marriage, from being sacked on this ground alone.  The clause also seeks, through amendments to the Education Act 1996 and the Equality Act 2010, to prevent Local Authorities and Local Education Authorities from using the Same Sex Marriage Act, if passed, as an excuse to bar groups who do not agree with same sex marriage from using public facilities or holding jobs as individuals in local government or education.

Should this modest amendment protecting citizens from coercion and exclusion be defeated, the way will be open in some quarters to class opposition to homosexual beliefs and behaviour, with support for violent fascism and racialism, as being seen as beyond the pale of decent society.  The sardonic prophecy by the late Trevor Howard in one of his most memorable films will have been fulfilled:  “When I was a boy we used to punish homosexuality; now we have to tolerate it; soon it will be compulsory.”  No-one in the West wants to punish the private expression of homosexuality, but few will ever, deep down, accept its officially endorsed public expression.

True Marriage

A same sex couple cannot be truly married because by definition and human biology they don’t qualify, just as would-be doctors don’t qualify if they fail their examinations.  Awarding make-believe certificates to medical failures would rapidly undermine the medical profession.   Similarly allowing same sex couples to acquire a make-believe marriage badge would undermine marriage, as in some left-wing quarters it is designed to do.  Far from “extending the sum of human happiness” as The Times put it, it will cause vast unhappiness to tens of millions of people who value and esteem true marriage with all its successes and failures as the “joining together of one man and one woman, to have and to hold from this day forward till death do them part”.

[1]  Blackwell Scientific Publications Ltd: Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles 1994.

[2]  Homophobia actually means not hatred of homosexuals, but hatred of self.

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