LORD David Steel, the architect of Britain’s liberal abortion laws, has said the Irish Government would be making a mistake if it goes ahead with plans to legislate for termination on the grounds of a threat of suicide.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/uk-peer-warns-on-suicide-clause-3333212.html
Just a thought, courtesy of my old Irish Press colleague, Mary Kenny, in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.
THE black poet Benjamin Zephaniah has been recalling this week that he turned down an OBE 10 years ago because mention of the British Empire reminded him of slavery, and such other nasty imperial deeds. But, look, there were also some pretty good aspects of the Empire. The lot of women particularly improved: the Empire helped to stop suttee in India (when a widow was compelled to die on the burning pyre of her husband’s corpse), restrained honour killings in Asia, and supported measures to stop foot-binding in China.
When orders of Roman Catholic nuns such as the Medical Missionaries of Mary started hospitals in Africa, they received material and moral support from the institutions of the Empire. In some parts of Africa, twins were considered “unlucky”; enlightened British rule helped change that notion.
Not long ago, a study showed that in around 1900, one third of those running the Empire were Irish. One of the attractions of British imperial rule was that it was religiously tolerant, and jobs and postings were available through merit, not via old-school ties. You didn’t have to be posh to be governor of Ceylon: you had to be clever, uncorrupt, and a good administrator.
No need to be ashamed of “Empire” in the OBE.
This tells the story of decline:
But was it “decline and fall” or “decline and legacy” – where ultimately the legacy was far more important and influential than the decline? For example, this…
And this… just yesterday:
The weakness of any argument is often revealed in the reversion of its advocates to the ad hominem mode – which is just another way of avoiding the issue at the heart of an argument. While not exactly ad hominem, more a question of ad institutionem, the media onslaught on the mild but clear utterances of the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales over Christmas did little more than betray the shallowness of the gay case for the redefinition and ultimate destruction of the institution of marriage.
As the British media response group, Catholic Voices, points out on its blog today, “references to the threat to marriage in Archbishop Vincent Nichols‘ Midnight Mass homily were brief — a matter of a few lines in what was mostly a gentle meditation on the meaning of the Nativity. He referred to “the love of husband and wife, which is creative of new human life” as being “a marvelously personal sharing in the creative love of God who brings into being the eternal soul that comes to every human being with the gift of human life.” Later — following a paragraph about businesses failing to respect people, and other examples of “corrosion” of human dignity – he added: “Sometimes sexual expression can be without the public bond of the faithfulness of marriage and its ordering to new life. Even governments mistakenly promote such patterns of sexual intimacy as objectively to be approved and even encouraged among the young.”
The blog notes that he also made forthright, heartfelt and thoughtful comments to the BBC, broadcast on Christmas Day, about the shambolic and contemptuous way in which the Government was going about the implementation of same-sex marriage.
But these mild and surely legitimate expressions of authority by a teacher in a law-abiding Church were enough to provoke what Catholic Voices termed “some stern sermonizing from same-sex marriage advocates, who rather than engage with his points, declared that Christmas was about ‘peace’ and ‘love’ which was being hijacked by the Archbishop of Westminster’s attempt to mount a political rally.”
The problem about peace and love is that one man’s peace is another man’s war and for King Herod the arrival of a particular baby in the world was about anything but peace. Archbishop Nichol’s reading of the significance of the event was true to its entire context. The reading of the media advocates of the gay lobby’s argument had more to do with the schmaltz with which the 20th century has smothered it. In the whole gay “marriage” campaign, the hi-jacking of language is rampant. The message which came into the world in the aftermath of that event in Bethlehem has for two thousand years consistently and persistently moved hand in hand with the message that marriage between a man and a woman is central to the well being of humanity and human society. Surely the outrage should be provoked by those who try to suggest that Christmas would be celebrating anything as contradictory as proposing that a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex be described as a marriage and be somehow consistent with the moral tenets of Christianity. If so it was not to be found in the British press this week. The campaign which can only result in the destruction of marriage in any meaningful form has far greater affinity with the world which Herod was seeking to protect than it has with the new world heralded by the arrival of the child he sought to destroy. He also was deceitful about his intentions. Gay lobbyists paying lip-service to Christianity are no less so.
Catholic Voices surveyed the press reaction to Nichols’ words:
There was Graeme Archer in the Telegraph, who claimed that “real men and women woke up on Christmas Day with nothing but love in their hearts, switched on the radio, and heard Nichols’s message to the planet. The bit about Jesus and love was cut from the headlines, in order to give him space to push his political agenda.” There was Ben Summerskill, head of the multi-million pound gay rights lobbyist Stonewall, who thought it “sad” that “an archbishop should sully the day of the birth of Jesus by making what seem to be such uncharitable observations about other people”, before adding, with an extraordinary mixture of pseudo-piety and acidity, that “some of us are mindful of Luke 2:4, which reminds us that Christmas Day is a day of peace and goodwill to all men. Perhaps Archbishop Nichols should have spent a little more time in bible study.”
Catholic Voices then raises the question:
If a Catholic bishop cannot raise the alarm over the destruction by the state of the most essential civil society institution in society and history, one founded on the God-created fertile complementarity of man and woman; and if he cannot do so on the eve of the Government bringing it before Parliament; and if he cannot express, when he does so, the mind of the Church — which is pretty much made up on this — then he would hardly deserve to be entrusted with the office. Summerskill seems to think that the Church should render unto Caesar everything and shut up shop.
Equally patronizing was Ian Birrell –tellingly, a former speech-writer for David Cameron — in The Independent, who suggested that the opposition of the Churches to gay marriage was evidence of their ‘irrelevance’ and ‘diminishing importance’. In other words, we don’t need to bother with their arguments or concerns, only to reassure ourselves that these are institutions which belong to the past. But because they persist, they must be dealt with harshly by the law. Thus ‘churches should no more be allowed to ban gay people from marrying in church than those who are black and disabled’, he rules, adding: ‘With luck, a rapid appeal to the European court of human rights will remove any opt-outs given to hostile religions’. As in China, revolutionary Mexico, or Soviet Russia, the remedy is simple: abolish any right the Church may have to govern itself; the ‘progressive’ state is limitless.
Birrell also tries to claim that the Archbishop has no right to criticize the undemocratic nature of the Government’s consultation because the Church is not a democracy. ‘For an outfit headed by someone who proclaims infallibility to complain about the lack of democracy when an elected government seeks to pass a law on a free vote in parliament takes not just the biscuit, but the entire packet,’ he writes, echoing Minette Marin in the Sunday Times: maybe the Government’s plans are shambolic and undemocratic, she says, ‘but the Church of Rome is hardly known for democracy or political accountability itself.’
Leaving aside the misunderstanding of the idea of papal infallibility, the stupidity of this argument is obvious. Almost no organization in society is run as a democracy: not businesses, not civil society bodies, and certainly not newspapers (when was the last time an editor was elected?), which, let us remember, have been in the dock for ignoring the law and fleeing public scrutiny. If the Independent, Telegraph or the Sunday Times do not run on democratic lines, with what justification – according to their columnists’ reasoning — do they slam the Government every day?
This post appeared on MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog yesterday evening.
David Page, from the United States, commenting on the post on Conjugality objected as follows:
This article is full of flaws. Mr. Kirke claims gay people are arguing for the destruction of marriage. That’s just silly. Gay marriage affirms the stabilizing effect of marriage. The Church should, at the very least, recognize this and stay out of the way. If they don’t like gay marriage then don’t perform any. But don’t try to tell my church that we have no right to perform gay marriages if we want to (and we do).
To which the author replied:
Consider this: the Communist regime in East Germany, when it came to power described itself as a democracy. As we well know it had as much to do with democracy as the regime which preceded it. Whatever hopes the unfortunate people of that region of Germany might have had of living in a democracy had those hopes destroyed when their ideological masters took control of their language and as much of their lives as they could. The true meaning of democracy remained and the effort to programme reality through language was of course a failure. Marriage will always be marriage – the conjugal union of a man and a woman. What will be destroyed by the attempt to change the definition of marriage in any given society will be the public perception of that institution within that society. A lie will become the official “truth”. That is a pretty destructive thing to do. For the unfortunate men and women in that society – as well as the children and families created by their conjugal unions – the connection between their unions and the word marriage will now be destroyed. Eventually however, the folly of the sentimental nonsense underlying this entire project will collapse under its own internal contradictions – like the Berlin Wall – and anthropological reality will reassert itself. In the meantime be prepared for the catalogue of dysfunction and misery which gross self-indulgence always brings in its wake.
In the 1960s Simone de Beauvoir was at the heart of the counter-culture of that age. As the Pope reminded us in his pre-Christmas address she advanced the then-radical view that one is not born a woman, but one becomes so – that sex was no longer an element of nature but a social role people chose for themselves. Her theory applied quid pro quo to men. She, with her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre, were the icons of the sexual revolution.
Fifty years later who is the leader of the new counter-culture in the West? Pope Benedict XVI is the answer. In a half-century the cultural pendulum has swung so far in the direction of Simone de Beauvoir’s view that we can now look at a routine questionnaire from an agency as commonplace as Stockport Council in Manchester and find a question asking “Is your gender identity the same as the gender you were assigned with at birth?”
In the 1950s and ‘60s the killing of babies in the womb was a crime, an offence against the person in the legislation of most Western countries. A map of the world then, showing where a child in the womb was considered to be a human being, is a radically different one form a similar map today. The international uproar reflected in media across the globe in the aftermath of the death of Savita Halappavanar in an Irish hospital last November – where it was alleged, without any reliable evidence, that she died because she was refused an abortion – was an astounding snapshot of the cultural and moral change which has taken place. With a total disregard for the facts of the case – and for the truth that Ireland’s maternity hospitals are among the safest places in the world for both mothers and children – the country was branded a pariah among the nations for its refusal to buy into a culture which legislates for the wanton destruction of human life in the womb. But ever there now, its PC-conscious political establishment seems determined to go with the flow and succumb to the concerted pressure for the international media, the UN, the EU – and Hilary Clinton.
Add to this the gradual acceptance of homosexual activity as just one more mode of sexual expression, along with the knock-on effect this is having on definitions of family and marriage, and you see that the social and cultural conventions of Western society have experienced a seismic shift. And who stands firm in the face of this? The Catholic Church and its moral leaders of the past 50 years – Pope Pau VI whose encyclical Humanae Vitae affirmed the anthropologically and moral foundations of its teaching on the nature and purpose of human sexuality; Pope John Paul II whose 27 years of tireless teaching and pastoral activity reaffirmed and developed the culture of life; and now Pope Benedict XVI whom only the blind – and there are multitudes of them – will not acknowledge as the leading public intellectual of our time.
All of them have done so in the face of near constant opposition from the spokespersons of the new conventional wisdom. Furthermore, Pope Benedict now does so in the face of triumphant cries of victory from the forces opposing this teaching. It might seem that the scheme laid out by Mammon for a new post-paradise world in John Milton’ Paradise Lost has come to pass as the Masters of this world seek to turn the desert of relativism into some kind of Heaven.
As he our darkness, cannot we his Light
Imitate when we please? This Desart soile
Wants not her hidden lustre;
Nor want we skill or Art, from whence to raise
Magnificence; and what can Heav’n shew more?
But Pope Benedict is having none of it. He knows that those “Gemms and Gold” are disastrous illusions. Recognising that at the heart of the new rebellion against God there is fundamentally a rebellion against man himself, he focused in that pre-Christmas address on the fear of commitment to anyone other than “self” in the modern world. Rhetorically he asked questions about the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment which today is at the very heart of the cultural and moral divide in the West and which have has so much bearing on the threatened destruction of marriage and the family.
“Can one bind oneself for a lifetime?” He asked. “Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for?
“Man’s refusal to make any commitment – which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering – means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his “I” ultimately for himself, without really rising above it. Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.”
“In the fight for the family, the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question,” the Pope said in his address . “The question of the family … is the question of what it means to be a man, and what it is necessary to do to be true men,” he said.
The craziness of gender theory, craziness of the kind exemplified in the thinking of those Stockport councillors, is central to the craziness which is seeking to redefine marriage. But it is a mere by- product of the attempt to redefine human nature itself.
The Pope spoke of the “falseness” of gender theories and drew on the wisdom of France’s chief Rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, who has spoken out against gay marriage. “Bernheim”, he said, “has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper.”
The Pope supports Bernheim’s thesis that up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, but that it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. For him this is exemplified in de Beauvoir’s infamous dictum: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient).
These words, outrageous when they were uttered and seen as such by the vast majority, are now no longer so. Anything professed to the contrary is now done so at one’s peril. To get evidence of that all you have to do is to survey the international media uproar in response to the Pope’s address.
De Beauvoir’s dictum has laid “the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality,” the Pope said. “According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.
“The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves…”
“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation.
“Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.”
France’s parliament is to debate the government-backed “marriage for all” bill early next year. With President Francois Hollande’s Socialists enjoying a strong majority, the bill is expected to pass despite opposition from the right and religious groups. In Britain the Conservative Party is getting itself tied up in knots over the issue as it leads Parliament into a vote on the which with unquestioned backing across the house it will inevitably win. The Administration in the US is driving the country in the same direction while in Ireland the political establishment has clearly bought into the same political consensus.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church, now truly counter-cultural, stands firmly by its teaching on the right to life, on human sexuality generally, on marriage and the family. It did so two thousand years ago, it has had to do so many times in the intervening centuries and it now has to do so again. That it might find itself doing so in a wilderness, surrounded by Mammon’s false “Heaven” on earth, will not deter it. That again would be nothing new.
On December 1 last, Cardinal George Pell delivered an address in Glasgow in which he both analysed the history of our Faith over the past 50 years and the behaviour of Catholic Christians in the post Vatican II era, good bad and ugly – and they were all there – and then suggested a programme for continuity with all that was good. In it he looked back to the optimism of the 1960s:
The 1960s was initially an age of optimism exemplified in the person of Pope John XXIII. President de Gaulle in France and Konrad Adenauer in West Germany were strong Catholics and the election of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president of the USA electrified the Irish diaspora everywhere in the English-speaking world.
The permissive revolution which followed the invention of the contraceptive pill in 1962 had not properly got under way and the social dislocation which accompanied the unpopular war in Vietnam had not reached its peak. The student uprisings in France and Germany in 1968 followed after the Council, but triggered a whirlwind of revolution in the Catholic world.
Pope Paul VI’s long delayed decision against artificial contraception in 1968 was a catalyst. Many realized their exaggerated ambitions for change would not be realized. 10,000 priests around the world left in the pontificate of Pope Paul VI and a larger number of religious. A number of my contemporaries had been ordained expecting to receive permission to be married later; they were disappointed.
Vocations to the priesthood and religious life declined in many Western countries and Catholic life collapsed in countries with an extraordinarily high rate of religious practice and with many missionaries overseas, e.g., Holland and Quebec. I was fearful in the past that we faced such a prospect of collapse in Australia; but the situation there has been stabilized, although the gains are still fragile.
Mixed fruit followed the efforts of the Second Vatican Council at New Evangelization, many of them not intended by the Council and not direct consequences of the Council teachings.
Where are we now? What can we do? Read on to get his answer.
What looks like the beginning of open warfare ensued in the Republic of Ireland yesterday with the announcement by the Coalition government there that it is going to prepare legislation for “limited” abortion in the State. In the aftermath of the announcement, the four Catholic Archbishops have issued their strongest ever condemnation of abortion as a moral evil. Meanwhile another bishop describes the proposal as the “first step on the road to a culture of death”. The main government party in the Coalition is also divided on the proposal.
The legislation is seen by all pro-life groups in the country as the first step towards abortion on demand in that the threat of suicide is being accepted as a ground for granting an abortion. The pro-abortion activists and those who support the proposed legislation – even though they say they are not pro-abortion – are failing to answer the question why these grounds for abortion will not lead to abortion on demand as it has done so in all other jurisdictions where it has been introduced.
Currently abortion in any form is prohibited by an act of parliament. This ban was confirmed as the will of the people in a constitutional referendum in 1983 which prohibits legislation to introduce abortion. This provision, however, was compromised by a judgement of the Supreme Court in the 1990s when it ruled that a woman threatening to commit suicide had a right to have an abortion since this was taken to be a threat to her life.
That judgement has been heavily criticised by psychiatrists who consider that threats of suicide are far too complex to be made the basis for a decision to end the life of an unborn child – even if that were ever to be considered a morally defensible act.
The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny and his senior Ministers are planning to reassure members of his party that allowing the threat of suicide as a ground for termination will not lead to abortion on demand. He has not, however, offered any kind of coherent reasoning to back up this assertion.
Minister for Health James Reilly last night said that “legislation supported by regulations will inform us to ensure that suicide will not be abused as it is perceived to be in other jurisdictions”. He has given no clues as to why pro-life campaigners should not consider this as any more than wishful thinking.
Irish radio reported him as saying that the legislation would have to cover suicide as the Supreme Court had been very clear in its judgment on the issue. He would try to create as much consensus as possible on the issue and hoped the legislation would be passed before next summer if not sooner.
Dr Berry Kiely of Ireland’s Pro Life Campaign said if the threat of suicide is included in any legislation to give legal clarity on abortion it will radically change medical practice in Ireland and the Irish legal system. Speaking on Irish radio Dr Kiely said it would introduce, for the first time, the direct and intentional killing of the unborn into Irish law.
She said there was a difference between medical treatment, which may result in the death of a foetus, and abortion, which is intended to end the life of the unborn. “This is where the whole issue of suicide comes into it, because a woman who says she’s suicidal because of being pregnant with this baby, what she’s saying is she doesn’t want a living baby at the end of this procedure,” Dr Kiely said. “You’re actually, in that situation, proposing to directly and intentionally ensure the death of her baby. That’s a very radical change for medical practice in Ireland, for our legal system, for whatever.”
The Government statement yesterday did not mention the matter but it is accepted that the grounds for a legal termination will include the risk of suicide or self-destruction. The legislative scheme will not, however, incorporate, or make legal, abortion in other in extremis situations, such as rape, sexual abuse, or rare fatal foetal abnormalities. However, the admission of legitimacy on any grounds – and particularly on grounds as open to manipulation as a threat of suicide – is seen as the thin end of the wedge to bring abortion on demand to Ireland.
Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte has said he is surprised by the vigour of the language used by the Archbishops statement. However, he has not on this occasion suggested that the representatives of the Catholic Church had no right to speak on a matter like this. The Bishop of Kilmore, Leo O’Reilly, said that the Government’s decision to introduce legislation and regulations on the abortion issue is the “first step on the road to a culture of death”.
The four Archbishops in their statement encouraged “all to pray that our public representatives will be given the wisdom and courage to do what is right”.
They state categorically that “If what is being proposed were to become law, the careful balance between the equal right to life of a mother and her unborn child in current law and medical practice in Ireland would be fundamentally changed. It would pave the way for the direct and intentional killing of unborn children. This can never be morally justified in any circumstances.
“The decision of the Supreme Court in the ‘X’ case unilaterally overturned the clear pro-life intention of the people of Ireland as expressed in Article 40.3.3 of our Constitution. To legislate on the basis of such a flawed judgement would be both tragic and unnecessary.
“The dignity of the human person and the common good of humanity depend on our respect for the right to life of every person from the moment of conception to natural death. The right to life is the most fundamental of all rights. It is the very basis for every other right we enjoy as persons.
“The lives of untold numbers of unborn children in this State now depend on the choices that will be made by our public representatives. The unavoidable choice that now faces all our public representatives is: will I choose to defend and vindicate the equal right to life of a mother and the child in her womb in all circumstances, or will I choose to licence the direct and intentional killing of the innocent baby in the womb?”
The government parties have declared that in the vote on this issue – when it comes to a decision on legislation – will not be a free vote. On this also the Archbishops had strong words on the moral implication of such a ruling. “Moreover,” they said, “in a decision of such fundamental moral importance every public representative is entitled to complete respect for the freedom of conscience. No one has the right to force or coerce someone to act against their conscience. Respect for this right is the very foundation of a free, civilised and democratic society.”
The husband of the late Savita Halappanavar says he would welcome any legislation that would prevent another death in the circumstances in which his wife died. Mrs Halappanavar (31) died in Galway University Hospital in October. She was found to be miscarrying her 17-week pregnancy. This sad case has provided a very emotional context to the legislation issue although this proposal to legislate has been on the agenda of the Government since a negative European Court ruling in 2010. However, there is no confirmation that Mrs. Halappanavar’s death would have been prevented had he baby been deliberately killed by the medical team dealing with her miscarriage. Praveen Halappanavar has said she was repeatedly refused a termination. No corroborating evidence of this has come to light as yet. The report of two investigations on what actually happened in the days leading to her death are currently awaited.
The Irish government, currently wriggling its way towards legislation to overturn its country’s pro-life laws without any clear mandate to do so from its electorate, will also soon be trying to overturn its pro-family and pro-marriage laws in pursuit of the folly of gay “marriage”. It is now embarking of a review of the Irish Constitution which since the 1930s has kept Ireland’s laws in a framework friendly to all those values. This review is being driven by elements within the government who see their mission in Irish society as one of bringing it into line with the rest of the liberal world. In doing this they are doing no more than imitating their nearest neighbours in the United Kingdom.
Indeed, what is unfolding in the Irish Republic is nothing short of a mirror-image of what its former colonial masters have done and are doing to themselves – providing abortion on demand, destroying marriage and de-Christianinsing their society at a breakneck pace.
The terms “dismay” and “outrage” seem too mild to describe the reaction which is evident across Britain in the wake of the government’s decision there to press on with its redefinition of marriage. Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph in its editorial comment decried the needles import to Britain of what it called America’s “culture wars” on this issue. Writing about the pitiable inadequacy of the so-called guarantees of religious freedom being offered by the government it went on to say:
Nor do the religious protections address another matter that vexes critics – namely the redefinition of marriage, understood by every human society through the ages to be a legal relationship between people of opposite sexes. Many Tory MPs and voters will simply not be reconciled to this, and neither will the churches, which have not even begun to organise against the Bill. They have millions of followers, and should they target vulnerable Conservative seats – as happened to Labour when the Roman Catholic Church forced the last government to retreat over faith schools’ admissions quotas – Mr Cameron may come to rue the day he embarked on this reform. Sad to say, but in a country that prides itself on its tolerance, he risks sowing division where none previously existed.
The latest onslaught on the government comes from the media response group, Catholic Voices, which this morning issued a statement describing the government’s announcements as shameful, undemocratic and cloaked in false legitimacy.
Their assessment and detailed analysis is as follows:
Tuesday’s Government response to its marital redefinition consultation, conducted earlier this year, has conclusively demonstrated that the entire consultation process had no purpose other than to shroud a shamelessly undemocratic exercise in a cloak of false legitimacy. It has made clear that it intends to redefine marriage despite opposition from the overwhelming majority of respondents to the Government’s proposals.
Of 228,000 individual responses to the consultation, 53pc – fewer than 121,000 – said same-sex couples ought to be able to marry, according to the Government. However, with every single petition the Government received on the issue opposing marital redefinition, it’s clear that more than four times as many people contacted the Government to support the traditional understanding of marriage rather than to overturn it: the Coalition for Marriage’s petition alone bore 509,800 signatures when it was submitted. It now bears more than 620,000.
The Government, therefore, can claim no mandate for its plans, and Archbishops Vincent Nichols and Peter Smith hardly exaggerate when they say “the process by which this has happened can only be described as shambolic”.
Marital redefinition went unmentioned in both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat election manifestos, and was absent from their 2010 programme for government. Parliamentary process has been scorned in the rush to redefine marriage: the Government has produced neither a green paper nor a white paper on this issue, which wasn’t so much as alluded to in the Queen’s speech at the State Opening of Parliament this May.
Despite lacking democratic legitimacy, Mr Cameron admitted last week that he intends to go even further than previously planned by facilitating the solemnizing of same-sex marriages by religious bodies. This U-turn makes a mockery of the already questionable consultation process, and is a profound betrayal of those who responded in good faith to the consultation – which a dozen times ruled out changes to what it called ‘religious marriage’.
Responding to Mr Cameron’s admission, the Anglican bishops drily observed that at least this suggested that the Government was starting to realise that, contrary to the chaotic language of the consultation document, the law recognises only one institution of marriage: “We welcome the fact that in his statement the Prime Minister has signalled he is abandoning the Government’s earlier intention to distinguish between civil and religious marriage.”
The Anglican bishops said that they looked forward to studying the Government’s response to the consultation, but will have found little comfort there. The Government boasts that it intends to introduce a ‘quadruple lock’ to protect religious institutions from being compelled to act against their principles in connection with the proposed legislation, but admits that churches and other religious bodies could still face legal challenges if they refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages.
The Government’s decision is probably motivated by a desire to evade challenges under the European Convention on Human Rights , but it is difficult to have confidence in any planned safeguards; the Human Rights Act embeds the ECHR in UK law, and the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that if a state allows for marriage between persons of the same sex, it must do so on exactly the same basis that it allows for other marriages.
Leaving aside how later parliaments might rescind any safeguards established by this one, it seems clear that any religious body which declined to solemnize same-sex marriages would almost certainly be acting against the Human Rights Act and the ECHR, and would, at the very least, be seriously vulnerable to legal challenges.
The Church of England, uniquely to be banned from solemnizing same-sex marriages, will probably be proof against such challenges, but in this case it would be the state itself that would be compelled to stand in Strasbourg and justify why same-sex Anglican couples should be uniquely barred by law from marrying in their own churches.
The proposals raise important questions about the status of the Church of England as an established church; the Government recognises Parliament’s right to overrule Anglican canon law, but ignores how the basic definition of marriage in English law has for centuries been that embedded in the Church of England’s official prayerbook, licensed by Parliament and recognising marriage as a voluntary union of a man and a woman with the principle aim of bearing and rearing children.
The Government’s proposition would require the state to speak differently from both sides of its mouth, Parliament saying one thing, and the Church of England saying another. This raises a profound constitutional problem, as George Pitcher recognised on BBC this week:
“If we’ve got the state having a completely different definition of what marriage is from what the Church calls ‘holy matrimony’ then it’s a bit difficult to see that the Church can continue with such a central area of our theology at variance with the state. We’ve got the Queen, who is not only the head of state but also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, presiding over our established church and – as a figurehead – over the state, and it’s very difficult to see how that can cohere once we’re departing on such important institutions in our heritage and history.”
Not merely is Mr Cameron out of his depth on how redefining marriage could have serious repercussions for the British constitution, but the entire Government seems to have a grievously flawed understanding of religious liberty and freedom of conscience.
The Government insists “no one should face successful legal action for hate speech because they preach the belief that marriage can only be between a man and a woman,” but in using the word ‘preach’, it seems, as with cases currently being considered by the European Court of Human Rights, to reduce ‘freedom of religion’ to mere ‘freedom of worship’. The ECHR, however, guarantees freedom to manifest religious belief in “worship, teaching, practice and observance”.
Catholic priests may be able to preach that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but will ordinary Catholics be permitted to practice what the Church preaches? Will those who believe ‘same-sex marriage’ to be a contradiction in terms be obliged to recognise it as a reality, rather than a legal fiction? The Government’s response is far from clear on such issues, and Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth seems to have been fully justified in asking, “Will Catholic schools, societies and institutions be free (and legally safeguarded) to teach the full truth of Christ and the real meaning of life and love?”
Interviewed on Radio 4 this Tuesday, Culture Secretary Maria Miller displayed her fundamental incomprehension of such issues when she dismissed concerns about consummation and adultery as irrelevant to same-sex marriages. Responding to the fact that some see these issues as central to what the word ‘marriage’ means, she said, “this may well be why the Catholic Church does not want to opt into the system of being able to offer same sex marriage”. However, as Timothy Radcliffe says, it is less that the Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage than that “it considers it to be impossible.”
If the Government’s response to its consultation tells us anything, it tells us that it wasn’t listening.
Religious freedom, however, is not the immediate issue here; more urgent, as our briefing paper In Defence of Conjugality: The Common-Good Case Against Same-Sex Marriage points out, are the questions of what marriage is, why the state has an interest in it, and whether the state has the power to redefine it.
The Government’s response states that “At its heart, marriage is about two people who love each other making a formal commitment to each other,” but it is difficult to see why such a private commitment should be a public concern: the state is not in the business of legitimating private relationships, and cares about marriage purely as a matter of public good.
British law has long recognised that marriage provides a uniquely stable and balancedenvironment in which children can be born and raised; protecting it as the one public institution that exists to uphold the principle that every child should – ideally – be raised with the love of a mother and a father.
It is telling, therefore, that the Government’s 47-page response devotes just three paragraphs to children, relegating them to the peripheral ‘wider issues’, and rejecting outright the view of 84pc of British people, as found by a ComRes poll for Catholic Voices this March, that children do best in life when raised by a mother and a father in a stable and loving relationship.
Regardless of governmental cynicism, it is indisputable that many support this project for the best of motives. Unfortunately, such support is misconceived: the introduction of same-sex marriage would not correct any injustices, couples in civil partnerships already having the same rights as married couples, and can only be brought about if British law decrees children to be at best peripheral to marriage and the state to have an interest in regulating people’s private lives.
Few people in modern Britain, it is safe to say, want either of these things.
(A version of this post appeared earlier today on the MercatorNet blog, Conjugality, where you will find more posts on the issue of marriage redefinition.)
In a very useful, polite but authoritative rebuttal of an apologia for the killing of the unborn in an Irish newspaper late last month, the distinguished Irish scientist, William Reville, concludes that while science remains a very long way from a fundamental understanding of how the embryo automatically unfolds so unerringly along the long developmental pathway from zygote to adult human it has already demonstrated that conception is the start of a biological continuum for each individual life that extends in an unbroken line until it terminates in death at the other end of the continuum.
“At every stage along this continuum each individual life has the full human properties appropriate to that stage. Pro-choice advocates refer to the early embryo as a potential human being. But in my understanding, this definition is wrong. In my opinion, the correct description of the embryo is a human being with potential.”
Read the full article in the Irish Catholic newspaper here.
William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at University College Cork.
Garvan Hill 