Gerald Warner: Parties will rue eagerness to institute same-sex marriage

LAST week saw a planetary alignment of Holyrood and Westminster social engineering projects as the enforcers in both parliaments carried forward – with varying degrees of dishonesty and incompetence – the imposition of homosexual marriage on society. The SNP government published its draft Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill on Wednesday; on the previous day the Culture Secretary Maria Miller (may we have our £90,000 back, please?) unveiled her incoherent and misinformed proposals to exempt certain denominations from the new legislation at Westminster.

The latest production from the Wee Scotch Senate is what one might have ­expected, in a chamber where every party is committed to this affront to democracy. There is just one exciting component to the Scottish legislative package: there is to be a consultation, closing on 20 March. A consultation – well, that changes everything. What could be more democratic? In fact, we have already had a consultation on this topic. It ­attracted a record 77,000 responses, 64 per cent of which were opposed to same-sex marriage. Alex Salmond and his ­“listening” government studied this expression of public opinion and concluded: “We’ll take that as a ‘yes’ then.”

Perhaps in this latest consultation they will take a leaf out of Dave Cameron’s book and rig the whole exercise. The UK consultation was so contrived online that anybody, anywhere in the world, could contribute their views anonymously, any number of times, and have them counted as representative of British public opinion. Homosexual lobby groups in America could hit the “send” button as often as they liked. Rigidly excluded, however, was a petition against the proposed change that was restricted to UK residents, signed with addresses supplied, which at that time carried more than half a million signatures. The total number of responses to the consultation was 228,000.

Ceausescu would have loved it. The problem for Dave is that, come the general election in 2015, votes cannot be emailed from San Francisco to save him and his forsworn party from annihilation. Nigel Farage has already said that UKIP will put opposition to same-sex marriage at the heart of its campaign in the European elections. When Maria Miller announced the special exemption for the Church of England and the Church in Wales she said: “This provision recognises and protects the unique and established nature of these churches.” The Church in Wales was disestablished in 1920; that blunder ­exposes the desperate, back-of-an-envelope expediency with which Cameron is struggling to force through this policy. Neither denomination had been consulted.

While the past months have demonstrated the level of public opposition to same-sex marriage, in terms of moral principle numbers are irrelevant. The first democratic vox populi of the Christian era was “Give us Barabbas!” The numbers merely illustrate, on their own secular terms, the hypocrisy of the politicians. The pretence that nothing would change except that a few more people would get married is transparent nonsense. Marriage would be gravely subverted – the real objective of the militant secularists driving this campaign – by redefining it to include its antitheses. Only one man and one woman uniting, sacramentally or civilly, to beget a family constitutes a marriage; anything else is bogus. Only the vanity of this generation despises the immemorial wisdom of the past. While mankind has progressed in understanding of the material universe it has regressed in metaphysical insight.

Every government minister, on both sides of the Border, knows that the European Court’s decision last March in Gas and Dubois v France means that churches will be ordered to perform homosexual marriages. Cameron’s useless “quadruple lock” and exemption of the Church of England merely affords an additional plea of “discrimination” to be added to the indictment. Whatever ambiguous noises Anglicans are currently uttering, the Catholic Church will stand firm. In its theology, homosexual acts constitute one of the Four Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance. The notion that any Catholic priest would subject himself to excommunication latae sententiae by officiating at a sacrilegious ceremony is deluded.

Neither the SNP suicides at Holyrood nor the Tory lemmings at Westminster have thought through the consequences of their modish radicalism. The great consolation is that public resentment will punish the SNP at the independence referendum and the rebarbative pseudo-Conservative Party will soon be as permanently excluded from power south of the Border as it already is north of it. «

Twitter: @GeraldWarner1