A few paragraphs to update the last posts and temporarily ‘close the lid’ on the matter.: [PS. inserted below on Wed 19 Dec]
1. David Cameron
‘This will be no small furore’, I observed here over his decision to introduce legislation to change the millenia-old understanding of marriage and, therefore, mentioned political aspects. Clerics had been dealing with this for some time and on Friday the political blogger Cranmer was scathing of the contemptuous way in which a Prime Minister had treated the Anglican Church. I note he links his final paragraph to an informative article I’d also read by the editor of The Spectator (Fraser Nelson) and thereby concluded:
His Grace prophesied earlier this year that gay marriage would turn out to be Cameron’s Poll Tax. He was wrong: it is the Poll Tax, hunting ban, Clause IV and the Iraq War all rolled into one. It is a disaster for both the country and the Conservative Party: Cameron has pitched the State against the Church and started a culture war of which there will be no end, there will be no end, there will be no end.
In an op-ed in Saturday’s Telegraph Charles Moore eloquently outlined some legal complications of Cameron’s decision:
Because he gave too little thought to the depth of the issue, he did not bargain for the trouble he is starting to get. And because no proper preparatory official work is ever done nowadays, there is confusion and embarrassment over what the new law will actually say. This week, poor Maria Miller, the minister on whose desk this has landed, was unable to tell MPs how gay adultery will be defined in law. There will be lots more questions like that. One I like is, Will the heir to the throne be allowed to have a gay marriage? If he is male, will his husband be King too? If, by surrogacy, their union is blessed with a child, will that child, though of the blood royal, be excluded from the succession? If so, how, in the name of equality, can that be right?
In his sanguine manner, Moore then asks about some collateral effects of the new Act of Parliament and considers political nuances behind Cameron’s decision (he’s not the first to connect it with mimicking Barack Obama). Moore then drives his argument to the irrefutable impossibility of same-sex weddings bringing the principal and tangible benefit of matrimony (as originally conceived and designed, I’d add!)…
Children exist because of men and women. Homosexuals may love one another just as much as anyone loves anyone else – and all disinterested love is a social good – but their domestic arrangements make no difference to the human future. Marriage is all about the human future (emphasis mine). It is mankind’s main investment in it.
He consequently concludes:
If you are conservative, you respect the past in order to secure the future. It is not easy to see how a policy which puts homosexual rights at the apex of public morality can possibly do that. Strange that the head of a party which calls itself Conservative is leading us down a cul-de-sac in the history of mankind.
Today’s (Monday) Daily Telegraph’s front page refers to ‘a cross-party rebellion’ and the centre page displays a letter signed by over 50 Parliamentarians written “in support for the institution of marriage as defined in law as a union between a man and a woman”. Furthermore, they state:
At the last election, none of the three main parties stood on a platform to redefine marriage. It was not contained in any of their manifestos, nor did it feature in the Coalition’s Programme for Government. These facts alone should have led to extreme caution on the part of those calling for this change to be made(emphasis mine).
[PS: 19 Dec – see objections from the Muslim Council of Britain and Cranmer’s take on this and the related sickening hypocrisy and inequality from liberal brigade’s claptrap.]
2. Maria Miller
Also on Saturday the same paper quoted Sir Alistair Graham, the ex-chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, as stating that the minister who announced the new matrimonial law would be “vulnerable to having to stand down as a minister” if she is disciplined by an inquiry into her claims for a second house where her parents lived.
This is only the latest in the Telegraph’s deep investigation into the outrageous scandal of widespread theft from the public purse by MPs. So Sir Alastair is reported as saying,
“My view is that ministers are in a key leadership position and if they are found to have broken the rules they can no longer continue to be part of the Government. We really can’t have a situation where the taxpayer is putting MPs parents in special position of being subsidised by public funds.”
3. Census 2011
The results of last year’s Census for England and Wales brought to light details of the massive immigration that has occurred as a result of the previous Labour government’s bad management and poor policies. Also, atheists have crowed over its findings upon religious belief. This aspect is capably covered by Gillan Scott in Census 2011: Atheist vs Christians and what the numbers don’t tell us.
Perhaps, in view of my dealings earlier this year with the lady behind the HOTS vs ASA issue, a humanist and two men with closed attitudes towards verifiable healings, you may care to dip into that post with its several informative contributions?
Richard's Watch 