Peter Hitchens on Marriage

Peter Hitchens, blogging at the Mail Online looks at how our default assumptions about marriage have changed.

There used to be things we never had to think about. It never crossed anyone's mind that marriage could be either wanted or accomplished by anyone except a man and a woman, and it isn't very long since divorce was very rare indeed, and everyone assumed that marriage was for life. The phrase 'till death us do part', at the heart of the Church of England marriage service, was the title of a long-running situation comedy, and nobody thought it odd or unfamiliar, as I think they would now. It was what most people had said at their own weddings.

I am always advising people to read the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which the Church's liberal establishment longs to be rid of but cannot quite stamp out. ... But 'The form of solemnization of Matrimony', the Anglican marriage service, is also a carefully-constructed contract, an explanation of the purpose of marriage and a guide to how it is to be done. The Church is of course trying its best to stop people using this service now, offering instead various bland and denatured rituals and hoping that couples won't be aware of the tougher, more serious and much more beautiful version in the Prayer Book.

And it has simultaneously retreated, shamefully, from its own insistence that marriage is for life by becoming increasingly sloppy about the remarriage of divorced persons in church, and even about the marital status of its own clergy. De facto, if not de jure, the C of E now believes that marriage isn't for life. Even so, the 1662 service remains the lawful standard against which all other wedding ceremonies can (and in my view should) be measured.

...Which brings me to the question of how it can be all right for a man and woman to marry when they have no intention of having children, and are possibly incapable of it, while it is wrong for a man to marry a man and a woman to marry a woman.

Well, here you run up against a number of problems. The answer seems to me to be blindingly obvious, and not to need any explanation to the conscious, intelligent person. Marriage, for most of us, is defined as a union between two people of opposite sex. A lifelong union of two people of the same sex, whether you approve of such a thing or not, is by definition not marriage. Children would of course be a likely result of a marriage, and are one of its main purposes. But they are not a necessary condition of it, as many childless married couples can testify. So that does not mean that the union of two opposites is the same as the union of two who are not opposite.

For those of us who grew up before the cultural revolution, it just is so that marriage is between a man and a woman. How could two men, or two women, be married? Until very recently, you might as well have asked 'Why can't bumble-bees do algebra?' Or 'Why can't buses jump over rivers?' Answers such as 'Because they just can't' or 'That's not what buses are for' or indeed 'Why would they want to?' occur, along with a feeling that the questioner is perhaps having a laugh at our expense....

Only in this unhinged age is it necessary to go, almost all the time, not just to first principles, but beneath even them, which demonstrates just how deeply revolutionary the cultural and sexual revolution is. It questions, and intends to loosen, the foundations of the pillars of civilisation. Let us hope it has a good replacement handy, for when those pillars finally fall.

But if I am compelled to put the blindingly obvious into mere words, this is how I would do it. A man and a woman marrying when they are past childbearing are honouring marriage and (perhaps in the case of two widowed people seeking companionship in later life) are hoping to emulate as much as possible of this complex relationship between the two very different sexes, in which each surrenders an important part of life in return for gaining something much greater. In the days when such things mattered, I imagine that many such couples did so also as their tribute to 'respectability'. They didn't want anyone to misunderstand the nature of their household, or to believe that they were defying a convention which they in fact respected. For the same reason many such people no longer get married at all.

The church's view that man and wife are 'one flesh' is not merely a metaphor for the children that they may produce. It is a statement that a man and a woman united in this way are greater than the sum of their parts, partly because they are so different from each other and have so much to learn from each other. The differences between the two sexes - the fact that each necessarily possesses characteristics the other necessarily lacks - are crucial to this formula. A man living with another man for their whole lives may learn all kinds of things. But he will not, I think, learn what a man married to a woman learns. Mind you, homosexual civil partnerships are not contracted for life, any more than heterosexual civil marriages are, since both can be lawfully dissolved, and I think this makes them very different things from lifelong religious marriages. There's an argument for saying that heterosexual civil marriage has more in common with homosexual civil partnership than it does with lifelong Christian marriage.

A man who seeks to marry a man (or a woman who seeks to marry a woman) is also in my view making a conscious or unconscious (and in most cases conscious) propaganda gesture against the existing idea of marriage. Such a relationship cannot produce a child of both parents at any age. It has to be primarily sexual in purpose. ...

 don't myself doubt that this is a major reason for the liberationist campaign for single-sex marriage - propaganda of the deed. I've often pointed out that the supposed benefits of civil partnerships, in terms of the treatment of 'next of kin' could easily have been achieved by other, less revolutionary legislation. The real point of the change was to emphasise that this is now a post-Christian society, a fact that is becoming more evident almost every day. The numbers of Civil Partnerships are actually quite small, after an initial rush, and several such partnerships have already been dissolved. I suspect that such partnerships will become less and less common as time goes by, and their propaganda effect weakens....

It's interesting, and it goes very deep. But ultimately we must recognise that a revolution is under way and that this is part of it, and that we must decide whether we support or oppose this. Revolutions will not allow you to be neutral about them for long, as they reach so deep into your private life.

And also here:

Should I be supporting homosexual marriage? No, because I believe that marriage is primarily for the procreation of children, and homosexuals, by definition, cannot do that. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Extend it to any other combination, and it isn't marriage. Also, marriage needs to be privileged to survive. A privilege which is not reserved to the people who have been given it is not a privilege, any more than a story which appears in all the newspapers at once is an 'exclusive'. If you can give the legal and moral privileges of marriage to a homosexual relationship, then you've really no argument for withholding them from a heterosexual couple who prefer not to be married. It is for precisely that reason that many heterosexual libertines (with no personal sympathy for homosexuals) are now fully signed up supporters of the Homosexual Liberation Movement.