Legislating Intolerance: Is Marriage a Dying Institution in England?
by Joanna Bogle - July 2, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
There's a problem at the moment in Britain with our sense of national identity. The problem is a compound of many things, of course: an all-pervasive culture of pop music and TV soaps, muddle about the way history is (or isn't) taught in schools, a substantial and growing Islamic presence, confusion about our role in the world, an obsession with denouncing the (real and imagined) mistakes and evils of our past.
But probably the single most important component is the one that most debates and discussions on the subject overlook: the collapse of marriage and family structures. And new laws that took effect in April this year are going to have a marked impact on all of this.
First, some background. New textbooks on "citizenship" for use in our schools – very much a project of the moment – emphasize sexual options as a fundamental part of "Britishness." We are meant to assume that having various sexual leanings – heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual – is all part of the culture of "choice" that is our birthright. The idea that a nation is built on families, and that the passing on of family names, along with traditions and history, culture and folklore, is central to the concept of nationhood would be regarded as anathema. I say "would be" because, as far as I know, no one has actually dared to announce it even as a suggestion. Sexual relationships are, in the current parlance, "all about choices," and it seems now to be regarded as quite wrong to suggest otherwise.
Now for the new laws: Under the new Sexual Orientation Regulations just passed by Parliament, anyone who challenges this notion of "choices" and appears in any way whatsoever to criticize the homosexual lifestyle will be criminalized. And I do mean criminalized: There are to be fines and possibly even custodial sentences for anyone who fails to deliver "goods and services" to people who are actively homosexual – "goods and services" in this instance including, for example, children who must be offered to homosexual couples for adoption from now on.
"Britishness," you see, is all about freedom to choose – not freedom for the child, of course, or for the natural mother giving up her baby for adoption, who might have wanted to specify a male/female married couple. No, "freedom" today is defined by political correctness.
There are many horrible aspects to all of this, one of the saddest being that the secretary of state who steered the legislation through Parliament is a Catholic, Ruth Kelly, whose membership in Opus Dei is much paraded (she's a supernumerary).
Kelly has said that she is proud to have gotten this legislation onto the statute book. She presumably hasn't read Sacramentum Caritatis, the recent papal exhortation on the Eucharist, which states:
Worship pleasing to God can never be a purely private matter, without consequences for our relationships with others: it demands a public witness to our faith. Evidently, this is true for all the baptised, yet it is especially incumbent upon those who, by virtue of their social or political position, must make decisions regarding fundamental values, such as respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one's children, and the promotion of the common good in all its forms. These values are not negotiable (emphasis added).
