Gay marriage: Children sacrificed on altar of adults' happiness

In an article in Taki's Magazine, Anthony McCarthy, SPUC's education and publications' manager, has provided a new and penetrating critique of the pro-gay marriage proposal being championed by members of the Conservative Party and in the Government’s response to the Equal Marriage Consultation published this month.   In this article Anthony McCarthy makes the following important points:

• Absent from the Tory proposal is any reference to a child or to children. Children have been airbrushed from the revised notion of marriage being promoted by these Tories.
• The Tory proposal reduces ‘marriage’ to a contract between two parties. Since these parties may be persons of the same sex there can be no place in the marriage contract for children. Marriage is just something that affects adults. It has nothing to do with raising the next generation, or with providing a stable environment in which children are raised.
• The new definition of marriage being proposed by these Tories would, if adopted, be the abolition of marriage as it has always been understood as far as the civil law would be concerned.
• In seeking to do this, these Tories are invoking a power which belongs to neither Church nor State. Marriage and family existed before the Church and the State. In fact the State is a coalition of natural married couples and their children. The family is the fundamental group unit of society, not “couples” of any kind.

Anthony McCarthy develops these ideas and more besides. He accurately identifies children as the ones whose interests are to be sacrificed on the altar of some adults’ arrogant claim for personal happiness. In this sense does Anthony use the term ‘child sacrifice’ to devastating effect. “This revolutionary move will”, he says, “harm the most vulnerable members of our society ... by making more likely ... the breakdown or avoidance of marriage, the contracting of marriage to involve only the couple, the refusal to see in the nature of man and woman a special complementarity inviting a binding relationship - one which can turn a person into a parent as opposed to a mere sperm or egg donor.”

Read SPUC's comments on the government's statement earlier this week - and our briefing notes for lobbying - and write and urge others to write today to MPs.

Comments on this blog? Email them to johnsmeaton@spuc.org.uk
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