Saturday 11 May 2013

Charles Moore and Nadine Dorries On #EqualMarriage: Your Dose of Hate In The Morning

Last night Charles Moore's latest article on how awful marriage equality is went up on the Telegraph's website. A few of us mocked it on Twitter for how rubbish it was and we moved on. Unfortunately some credulous MPs found it thought-provoking. Enter Nadine Dorries.

Charles Moore states some rather bizarre things in his article.

According to the “public sector equality duty”, all acts and institutions of government must enforce Equality in all its various “strands”. (There are seven of them, and “gender reassignment” is given the same status as “religion”.
Because believing in whatever deity you may means you are way better than those evil transgender people who just want to... erm... live their lives? Instead of calling it "equality" we should refer to it as "treating people as we would wish to be treated". I shall label it the Golden Rule. Could found a few religions on that...
But it failed to still the anxiety. If marriage is redefined by statute to include same-sex marriage, then a teacher who refuses to teach this as right is in breach of his public sector equality duty. And while a church will be protected in its own premises, a Christian charity providing services to all, or religious groups wanting to hire council facilities, can be banned by the accusation that they are “homophobic” organisations.
Moore ignores fact teachers are at risk of being sacked right now for supporting equality if they work in a religious school. And ignores that, under "public sector equality duty", Christian charities and religious groups will be under no more risk than they are today of being refused facilities. Why? Because they could be labelled as "Homophobic" organisations with or without marriage equality. Such a red herring.

The Government has listened too much to pressure groups and far too little to people who know about marriage. Thus the gay lobby group Stonewall has become a partner with government in educational projects (such as Lesbian and Gay History Month). Its 60,000 signatures in favour of gay marriage were accepted during the Bill’s consultation period as representing that number of individuals, whereas the Coalition for Marriage’s petition signed by 650,000 – more than 10 times the Stonewall number – was counted only as the single voice of one group.
Ignoring the fact that Stonewall submitted no such petition. And the Coalition for Equal Marriage's petition (which I suspect he thinks Stonewall is behind!) was NOT accepted. Both petitions were treated the same. Even the Telegraph states that here.

Too late, they discovered, this cannot be done. Civil servants, confronted with the embarrassing task of working out what defined the consummation of a homosexual relationship, faltered. Since homosexual acts have no existential purpose and no procreative result, consummation is a meaningless concept. From this it followed that the Government could come up with no definition of adultery in a homosexual marriage. A law designed to be equal, is not. Under the Bill, non-consummation will not be grounds for divorce in same-sex marriage. Nor will adultery. 
By accident, then, the Government is introducing, for the first time, a definition of marriage which has no sexual element. Yet it refuses to face the logical consequence of this surprising innovation. If sexual intercourse is not part of the definition of same-sex marriage, why should blamelessly cohabiting sisters not marry one another in order to avoid inheritance tax? Why should father not marry son? Why shouldn’t heterosexual bachelor chum marry heterosexual bachelor chum? What, come to think about it, is so great about the idea of monogamy, once sex and children are removed from the equation? Does the word “marriage” any longer contain much meaning?
This total non-issue is a quirk of English and Welsh law and not of the fundamental nature of marriage. Hence why this hasn't been part of the debate in other jurisdictions. Has everyone forgotten Scotland? Charles Moore has.

Why shouldn't a mother marry a son in Scotland? I don't know. Charles Moore presents no argument here. Charles Moore gets so carried away with trying to link homosexuality to incest that he sort of forgets to think outside of the London Metropolitan Elite (see what I did there?) and pay attention to how things work in other areas of our own country!

So most people reading this highly flawed article would have thought "Oh Charles Moore, what were you thinking?". Except Nadine Dorries. Who thought it was amazing?





Oh Dorries. What are you going on about? Same-sex marriages, under the proposed law, can be conducted in a church. Does Nadine think a humanist marriage in Scotland is unacceptable? Does she want to tell those humanists to stop what they are doing immediately? No. She just doesn't like gay marriage. It really is that simple.

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