As Ireland prepares for a referendum which proposes to remove from its Constitution any obstacle to the redefinition of marriage the advocates of same-sex marriage say it is a simple matter of officially recognising the love of two people. This case in Britain shows that it is no such thing and that the cultural change it will bring about threatens the freedom of thought and expression of all. On Irish Television on Monday night the issue was debated for almost an hour. The fear and loathing which a British marriage campaigner spoke of as now prevailing in that state for those who resist the new culture is perfectly illustrated by this case. Richard Page, a 68-year-old British Justice of the Peace and evangelical Christian, has been condemned by the country’s highest legal authorities, suspended, and subjected to a day-long re-education session to rid him of the dangerous belief that a child would be better off being adopted by a family with a mother and a father than by a same-sex couple. Page sat on a family court tribunal last summer to consider a social worker’s recommendation that a foster child be adopted by a gay couple. “I raised some questions in private with the other judges, including that I thought that because a baby comes from a man and a woman it made me think the child would be better off with a father and a mother than with single-sex parents. The other judges didn’t agree at all,” he told LifeSiteNews. Worse, the other judges complained. A review committee concurred, suspended him from the bench and recommended he be kicked off the lowest rung of the judiciary (but which handles 90 percent of all criminal crime, plus youth and family cases). “They said I had a closed mind because of my Christian beliefs,” he said. “They said I could not put my Christian beliefs above the rights of single-sex couples. They said I had to open my mind. But I think when you order someone to open their mind, then you are the one with a closed mind.” In the end, the Lord Chancellor, cabinet minister Chris Grayling, and the Chief Justice John Thomas, decided to issue a reprimand and a day-long re-education order. “Mr. Page, while sitting in Family Court,” it stated in part, “was found to have been influenced by his religious beliefs and not by evidence.” The pair rated his behaviour “a serious misconduct” and added, “Mr. Page should have recused himself from the matter.” But there is evidence that Page is correct. Simon Fraser University economics professor Douglas Allen, for example, studied thousands of homosexual and heterosexual couples drawn at random from Canadian census data to find that a third fewer of the children from same-sex households graduated from high school than those from natural families. One speaker on Monday’s Irish television programme described the effect of what the change in the Irish Constitution would be as a domino effect. Justice Page is just one little domino in the game in progress across the Irish Sea. Soon to be played in a casino in Dublin?