In a recent exchange of emails, my Member of Parliament, Mr Andy Slaughter, told me he intended to vote in favour of same-sex marriage. No doubt by now he has done so. He said he believed it to be an extension of human rights. I replied that, just as there can be reductio ad absurdum, so there can perhaps be extensio ad absurdum, but I am not sure that my Latin is correct. Anyway, MPs do not to have to reply to replies. Indeed, I feel slightly sorry for Andy Slaughter, bombarded not just by letters and emails protesting against same-sex marriage, but some of the million postcards distributed through Catholic parishes in the Diocese of Westminster.
The postcard points out that same-sex marriage was not in the Conservative manifesto and that it will degrade marriage and the family. I suspect that there is more than this behind most Christians’ opposition to the Act. As Peter Hitchens wrote in this publication almost a year ago, the institution of marriage is already degraded by being ignored by many couples: and it was redefined when same-sex couples were permitted to adopt children. Many Christians, I suspect, object to same-sex marriage because they consider homosexual intercourse morally wrong while sex within marriage is not just licit but sacred; in Catholic countries God-fearing households have a crucifix above the conjugal bed. To call a homosexual union a marriage is therefore blasphemous. It is this that upsets so many Christian believers.
At a dinner party in Bayswater last week I asked a fellow guest, a former Tory European Commissioner, what he had thought of Cameron’s speech on Europe. He said he thought it was good but had been dismayed by the Prime Minister’s failure to acknowledge the strong feelings of many Continental Europeans in favour of a united Europe. He mentioned the idea of ‘an ever closer union’ only to dismiss it as one of the things the EU would have to jettison along with fishery quotas. Since living in Berlin in my early twenties, I have always been an advocate of a united Europe. At the time, it seemed obvious that the nations of Europe, instead of fighting each other, should form a federation like the United States. It was a patriotic agenda. British prestige was high: if we seized the moment, we could forge a future superpower in our likeness and extend our influence around the globe. It was not to be; no one in Britain wants a federal state. We are too attached to our adversarial democracy to accept the kind of consensual dirigisme necessary to make such a polyglot nation work. If we remain in the union, we will be constantly at cross-purposes with many of our fellow Europeans. It would be more honest to get out. David Cameron seems to have a different concept of patriotism to mine. Listening to his speech, I kept thinking ‘John Bull’. I felt embarrassed when he said recently, in a morale-boosting address, ‘We defeated the Nazis.’ What about the Red Army and the GIs? It was the same with his patronising offer of the services of the SAS to sort out the hostage crisis in Algeria. Surely the Algerians have been fighting a successful war against their own Islamists for the past 12 years? William Hague is John Bull with a Yorkshire accent. The import of his observations about the turmoil in the Middle East seems to be: if only you feckless foreigners would be more like us, you wouldn’t be in this mess. There is no mention of the skulduggery, self-interest, divide-and-rule and disregard for democracy that has driven British policy in the region for 150 years.
Unpatriotic and, as the proponents of same-sex marriage would have it, ‘on the wrong side of history’ and ‘out of touch’. With four adult children, I am hardly out of touch with the thinking of Cameron’s generation. And it remains to be seen whether I am on the wrong side of history. Insisting on marriage as a lifelong monogamous commitment would have placed me on the wrong side of history in Mecca in the 630s, Toulouse in the 1130s, Münster in the 1530s, or Salt Lake City in the 1880s. The French and Russian revolutions came up with some barmy ideas. In Britain in the 1930s, H.G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes and Bernard Shaw considered themselves in the vanguard of history with their views on eugenics. Most bien-pensant French intellectuals in the 1950s, and some British ones too, thought communism was the future and capitalism doomed.
History has taken many wrong turnings, and what is considered progressive by one generation is often junked by the next — though, to give the Cathars, Anabaptists, Mormons, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, eugenicists and Stalinist fellow-travellers their due, none came up with anything as far-fetched as same-sex marriage.