Swallowing a Dozen Camels, and Straining on a Gnat. The Same Sex Marriage Debate Drags On
It is now more than three years since I publicly gave up arguing about same-sex marriage. The best summary of my position can be found here http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/03/the-gay-marriage-trap/. I also moderated a debate on the subject in Moscow, Idaho, in which my old friend Doug Wilson discussed the issue with Andrew Sullivan (it’s described and discussed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/moscow-nights-a-debate-on-same-sex-marriage-between-andrew-sullivan-and-douglas-wilson.html and I believe there is a YouTube version, though it is very long and gets a bit patchy towards the end). During my preparation for this debate I became even more convinced that same-sex marriage was a consequence, not a cause, of the collapse and evisceration of marriage as a whole. I do not believe same-sex couples would seek to contract pre-1968 exclusive indissoluble lifelong marriages.
Since adopting this position, I have continued to receive the abuse and misrepresentation of sexual liberationists, who (like many people, both ‘supporters’ and critics) don’t actually read what I say but prefer to imagine my opinions. I was struck, during a BBC ’Question Time’ in which I explained why the issue was too trivial to matter, by Stella Creasy MP even so aiming a barb at me based on the belief that I had just expressed opposition to same sex marriage. I suspect that many of my conservative ‘supporters’ likewise continue to imagine that I am in the forefront of the battle against this tiny phenomenon.
And, during my now-notorious clash with Dan Savage and others on ABC’s ‘Q&A’ in the Sydney Opera House, I never expressed any opinion on same-sex marriage, nor was I asked to do so, but was treated throughout as if I had done so.
So, as usual, I have gained nothing by being truthful. You can see why so many people in public life decide that lying is a wise course of action, but I still hold out against it.
Now I find my position being challenged here, rather oddly, by contributors who appear to be atheist radicals. If I have mistaken the position of Neil Saunders, for instance, perhaps he will put me right.
And yet these critics rail at me for not continuing to oppose same-sex marriage.
I have been having a bit of a dialogue of the deaf with Mr Saunders.
Here are two recent posts by Mr Saunders in which I have inserted comments in the usual way.
1: To Peter Hitchens: What (and please be specific yourself) in what I wrote in my previous post is "inaccurate"? PH writes: What was inaccurate was his claim that I concede all advantage to the revolutionaries by refusing to get worked up about a few thousand same-sex couples contracting civil marriages. What advantage do I concede? Were I to engage in furious campaigning against them, would I weaken their position? On the contrary, I would strengthen it. They long for my opposition and are frustrated and disappointed when I decline to provide it. **** Also, until you say exactly which "moral conservatives" have made fools of themselves, and which of their arguments have been "silly" and "self-damaging" you are simply striking a rhetorical posture, and not offering any kind of genuine argument. *****No, that is not so. I don't believe Mr Saunders doesn't know to whom I am referring, but the recent failed campaign for marriage led by Lord Carey at al, is a good example of this sort of thing, and of its utter, embarrassing failure. He might also read Hansard for the debate in the Commons on same sex marriage.**** Again, it is not sufficient simply to assert that the issue of SSM is "minor"; you must show: a) that it is in fact so, and 2) why it is so.) ***I have many times done so by noting the actual number of same sex marriages, and the proportion of marriages they encompass. He can look this up.**** Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the matter, in the present debate your repeated references to no-fault divorce are at best an irrelevance and at worst some kind of diversionary tactic in debate. ***This response just shows that he does not understand my point. I will make it again. Same sex marriage neither establishes nor violates any principle which was not established nor violated at the time heterosexual marriage was reformed and eviscerated, in 1968. If Mr Saunders disagrees with this simple point, then he can show what principle was established or violated by same sex marriage, which had not already been established or violated by the 1968 legislation. I am agog to hear what it is. **** Colm J has stated very lucidly the principles at stake in the issue of SSM, with absolutely no reference to no-fault divorce. ***I have missed this. Perhaps, if it was so lucidly stated, Mr Saunders could quote or summarise. *** Would Peter Hitchens find SSM acceptable if no-fault divorce were to be reintroduced for all marriages including same-sex ones? ****This is truly odd. I am not arguing about 'acceptability', a subjective matter of no interest in a debate on principle and on reality. Who cares what I find 'acceptable' in this discussion? Anyone can see that my own preference is for indissoluble lifelong monogamous faithful marriage. But it has been abolished, and I have absolutely no power to restore it, so my preference is of very little moment. As for no-fault divorce, how can this be reintroduced when it is what we have had for nearly 5 decades? Does he understand what we are discussing? If he means the opposite, I believe there would be very little enthusiasm for pre-1969 marriage among any group of sexual liberals of any kind. That is the whole point****
And 2: To Peter Hitchens: I should have thought that the freshly-minted entitlement of "a few thousand same-sex couples" henceforth to dictate the meaning and content of marriage for the entire society (on pain of social, legal and financial penalties to dissentients) is worthy of a little more than a defeatist shrug (to the establishment forces you - with good reason, perhaps, as far as your livelihood is concerned - fear) and a patronisingly dismissive attitude towards the "little people" like me who look to people like you - in view of your general social attitudes and the public platform you command - to articulate our despair. To begin with, which of Lord Carey's arguments were you particularly unpersuaded by? Which was especially injurious to his cause? Short as the debate in Parliament on the subject of SSM was, both in absolute and relative terms (given the momentousness of the changes being proposed and legislated for), it is not possible to discuss adequately here all of the arguments reported in Hansard. I note simply that Sir Tony Baldry and Nadine Dorries raised the interesting technical issue that since non-consummation and infidelity retain their previous legal meanings (i.e. as involving partners of the opposite sex), these notions do not apply to same-sex marriage. So much for "equality", then. Meanwhile, another opponent of SSM, Robert Flello (Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent) remarks: "The state has sought to treat marriage in a special way in recognition of its intrinsically child-centred nature. That is the only reason why the state has previously had any interest in marriage at all. If marriage were simply about love and commitment, we would first have to define love as being sexual love, because otherwise non-sexual relationships that are based on love and commitment would also have to be treated as marriage on the basis of the definition of equality. If the definition of marriage is simply love and commitment, why is the state interested at all? What business is it of the state's to register and record such unions? It is because marriage is about so much more that the state has historically wanted to be involved.... "I fully accept that the state has changed some aspects of marriage, but not its intrinsic, fundamental values. "The irony of the Bill is that it takes the current situation of equality of marriage and civil partnership and creates inequality. Under the terms of the Bill, there will be marriage in two forms - traditional marriage and same-sex marriage, which are neither the same nor equal. The Bill creates further inequality, with traditional marriages being allowed within some Churches and same-sex marriages not allowed. Same-sex couples will have the choice of civil partnership of marriage, whereas opposite-sex couples can have only traditional marriages - yet more inequality. The Bill is trying to engineer a cultural equivalence to tackle a perceived lack of equality in wider society. That does not sound to me like the basis of marriage." I should be interested to know why you disagree with these statements, or think that they have misfired and justifiably brought obloquy and ridicule on their authors' heads.
I’ll now reply to the above.
A 'defeatist' seeks for and encourages the defeat of his own side. Once his own side has been defeated, he cannot do this even if he wants to. It is not 'defeatist' to acknowledge defeat after it has happened. It is simply honest and realistic.
My point remains – what principle is established or violated, by the introduction of same-sex civil marriages, that hasn’t already been established and violated elsewhere?
In short, why is this one small event, affecting a tiny number of people, worth arguing about at all? What does Mr Saunders mean when he speaks of ‘dictat[ing] the meaning and content of marriage for the entire society’.
What is this ‘meaning and content’ , which same-sex marriage dictates? How does it dictate it?
No-one can answer. Lord Carey’s campaign asserted that same-sex civil marriage would damage marriage as a whole.
But how would it do this? What specific blow would it strike? I have never been able to find an answer to this.
There are some dud attempts to do so, for instance:
The argument that a same-sex marriage cannot produce children (except by surrogacy or IVF or other indirect methods) is a) perfectly true and b) fundamentally weak. Even the 1662 Prayer Book (which specifies that marriage is firstly ordained for the procreation of children) allows for a variation in wording, for couples past childbearing. If a mixed-sex couple who cannot have children, can be lawfully married, then why should procreation be insisted upon as a rule for same-sex couples?
If that’s of no interest to you, then the universal availability of the female contraceptive pill, to the married and unmarried alike, not to mention the free distribution of morning after pills to all who ask, and of abortion on demand, all of which are much used by heterosexual married couples to ensure that they do *not* have children, makes it hard to argue that the childlessness of same-sex marriage sets it apart from heterosexual unions, or that it violates or establishes a principle not already violated or established by tens of millions of married heterosexuals all over the western world. If so, what principle is it?
The issue of non-consummation is technically interesting to those who are interested in that sort of thing, but again has no real bearing on anything much. I cannot recall that many heterosexual marriages have been dissolved on this ground. Some (only one in six) are still dissolved on the grounds of adultery, but I think it would be fairly easy for those involved to have found another route to divorce, had they not been able to prove adultery. Nor am I aware of any wording in heterosexual civil marriage ceremonies which refers to or requires consummation. Raising such a subject in a parliamentary debate smacks of desperation, and a general lack of ammunition.
Fidelity? Leaving aside any other considerations, about which we can only guess because of the lack of recorded facts on fidelity in heterosexual marriages, the remarriage of divorced persons with living spouses, permitted by law and increasingly by the churches as well, makes a nonsense of any principled support for fidelity or even monogamy.
Some recent statistics (England and Wales):
15% of divorces are granted for adultery, with equal proportions of men and women initiating the petition ; 36% of all divorces granted to men and 54% granted to women were for ‘unreasonable behaviour’; 32% granted to men and 22% granted to women followed 2 years of separation, and consent; 16% of divorces granted to men and 9% of divorces granted to women followed five years of separation, and did not require consent. These last were effectively ended by the state against the wishes of one spouse or the other – the extraordinary arrangement (unique, I think, to marriage law) under which the state takes the side of the one who breaches a contract, rather than the side of the one who wishes to maintain it.
Knowledge that this sort of imposed divorce is ultimately possible can, I think, be presumed to affect the attitudes of spouses who might otherwise fight a divorce, but decide not to knowing they are, in the end, bound to lose.
42% of marriages now end in divorce. Almost one in five divorces involve one spouse who has been divorced once before. In almost one divorce in ten, both spouses have divorced before.
Very large numbers of people cohabit, and begin and end partnerships at will, without ever marrying or divorcing at all.
In the seven years 2005-2012, just 120,908 individuals entered (same sex) civil partnership (17,273 per year, though this figure may be distorted by an initial rush when the law was first changed. Currently there are about 500 same-sex marriages a month). The total number of marriages as a whole is approximately 260,000 a year (roughly 21,660 a month)
There are indeed anomalies resulting from this. Heterosexual couples cannot contract civil partnerships, but same-sex couples can. I think our post-Christian state will resolve this (will probably be compelled to do so by the ECHR) by allowing civil partnerships for heterosexuals, this creating an openly temporary and wholly non-religious alternative to marriage, which may attract some secularists, and others seeking to establish some sort of contractual, enforceable relationship but who still regard marriage with suspicion and hostility.
Just as there is no significant difference between civil partnerships and same sex marriages, except the name, there will be no significant difference between heterosexual civil marriage and heterosexual civil partnerships, except the name.
But if so it will merely be a pause on the way to the disappearance of formal partnerships, except among those who have propagandist reasons for contracting them, such as lesbian clergywomen, and perhaps among declared Christians who may (like French Roman Catholics) find themselves having to marry twice, once in a religious ceremony which binds them personally but is unrecognised by state or courts, and once in a civil ceremony which necessarily involves the state in their affairs, for the purposes of taxation, inheritance and property, but whose provisions and limits fall short of their desires and intentions.
There will, I suspect, be very few of either sort within 100 years. There may well be, as part of this, attempts by the church to introduce forms of ‘marriage’ which actively defy scriptural authority (just as the remarriage of divorced persons with living spouses in Church already does). These will be distressing to serious believers, but are a consequence of decades of divorce, promiscuity, remarriage, abortion etc, often unopposed and sometimes supported by the Church, which are the real sources of distress.
Baroness Hale’s long-ago perceptive pronouncement, that ‘family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union. It has adopted principles for the protection of children and dependent spouses which could be made equally applicable to the unmarried’, remains as true as when she first said it. The Baroness, now an eminent Justice on our (misleadingly named, as it is subject to the ECJ in Luxembourg) ‘Supreme Court’, prophesied correctly that the ‘piecemeal erosion’ of the distinction between the married and the unmarried could be expected to continue. So it has, by the increasing dilution of marriage to the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish it from unmarriage. And she concluded that we should be discussing ‘whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purposes.’
That’s the real problem, and has been for decades.
The claim that ‘Under the terms of the Bill, there will be marriage in two forms - traditional marriage and same-sex marriage, which are neither the same nor equal.’ Seems to me to be inaccurate. There is no such thing in English law as ‘traditional marriage’, and there has not been since the 1968 Divorce Law Reform Act ended any lingering resemblance between readily dissoluble civil marriage and indissoluble Prayer Book marriage. There is a form of heterosexual civil partnership which is politely called ‘marriage’ but is in fact nothing of the sort.
The claim that ‘The Bill is trying to engineer a cultural equivalence to tackle a perceived lack of equality in wider society.’ Is by contrast more or less right. But so does most sexual and social legislation passing through Parliament, and such things (which might well have been resisted in the pre-revolutionary Britain before the cultural revolution) are now normal. What new principle is being established or violated? It’s just another rather thin slice of salami, taken from a sausage which is pretty much used up anyway.
Why strain at this gnat, having swallowed so many very large camels without so much as a pause for breath?
There is one undoubtedly powerful argument here - the one which points out that brothers and sisters living together in non-sexual relationships cannot contract civil partnerships and so cannot obtain the privileges of inheritance tax exemption or next-of-kin access which come with such things.
This anomaly makes it plain that the whole thing has been from the start, and always will be, a propaganda exercise rather than an impassioned search for justice. If you seek justice for yourself, you must seek it for others who are affected by the same injustice. But the same sex marriage campaigners were never interested in this problem. I've never even heard or seen them address it.
Now, for what purpose was this begun? Was it truly because homosexuals were jealous of the heterosexual married state and its largely non-existent privileges and standing? Many of them must have changed their minds profoundly in this case for, in the 1960s, most sexual revolutionaries despised marriage of any kind as a patriarchal prison, best dispensed with altogether.
Or was it a clever chess move, designed to tempt moral and social conservatives into a doomed campaign to oppose it? I know what I think.