Culture, Faith & Ethics

The burden of proof in rape cases

2011-03-02T11:30:00.001Z

I had an interesting discussion - well, more of a row, really - with my girlfriend yesterday following last night's episode of Silk on BBC 1. This featured a rape case in which - as is usually the case - the conviction or not of the defendant came down purely to the question of who the jury believes. In this instance, the defendant was acquitted, although the programme provided additional information to the audience compared with what was available to the jury so as to suggest that a guilty verdict would have been more reasonable.

The argument with my girlfriend was sparked off by my observing that, as far as I am aware, the guidance that is now given to boys in English schools is that they have to obtain definite, positive consent to sex in order to be sure that they are not committing a rape, rather than just the absence of a 'no'. In other words, it's no longer an excuse to assume that, if the woman does not say no, she is giving her consent: she has to provide a clear and unambiguous 'yes'. I then went on to say to my girlfriend that, in the rape case on the TV drama, this had not been reflected in the interrogations in court of the victim and defendant: the victim confirmed she had not said 'no', but this was allowed to be construed as a potential 'yes'; whereas if the man had been under an obligation to obtain a positive 'yes' (not just the absence of a 'no'), then the incident in question would much more likely have been interpreted as a rape. In other words, if a man does not obtain unambiguous consent, then consent should not be assumed, either by the man or by a court. I observed that the trial in the drama did not seem to reflect this shifting of the burden of proof in favour of the woman.

The row that ensued owed more to my girlfriend's own personal experiences than to the merits or otherwise of the technical point I was making, and my girlfriend argued that distinctions of the kind I was making changed nothing about the basic dilemma that it still comes down to who the jury believes. This is true. But it's equally true that the change in emphasis to which I was referring is not insignificant: while it doesn't affect the fact that rape cases hinge on who the jury believes, it does affect what they are required to believe; i.e. whether explicit verbal consent is given or not, rather than just implicit, tacit consent.

This distinction can be brought to bear on one of the drama's pivotal moments, where the council for the defence (a woman who has strong reservations, to say the least, about the merits of her own case) asks the defendant to look her, the jury and the victim in the eye and state that he didn't commit a rape. With the change in emphasis from tacit to explicit consent, the prosecution would have been able to ask the defendant not whether he had committed rape but whether at the time he was absolutely sure that he wasn't committing rape. Any hesitation or uncertainty on the defendant's part could then have been construed as implying that the defendant wasn't completely sure. In other words, even if, in his own mind, what he was doing didn't constitute rape, if there was any doubt about the consent of the woman at the time of the incident, then this is tantamount to rape: having sex without obtaining the explicit consent of the woman.

Of course, it is always possible that a man can have sex with a woman without being completely sure he has obtained her consent, and that the woman is in fact consenting but subsequently decides to accuse the man of rape. This is not a rape but the man is on one level just as 'guilty' as if it were: whether the woman was actually willing or not, the man did not fulfil his moral or legal obligation to obtain explicit consent.

If this principle were reflected in law, and not just in English school class rooms, then women would in fact be much more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt by juries; and it would make it easier to obtain convictions in rape cases.

However, if this principle were indeed incorporated into English law, would it mean that, in every single instance, consent could not be assumed and would have to be explicitly requested, thereby destroying the magic of intimate moments between loving couples slipping wordlessly into passionate love making, to say nothing of eroding the bonds of absolute trust that should exist between, say, a husband and wife?

And is a man making love to a woman without being 100% sure he has obtained consent - but where that consent is both apparent and actual - really effectively guilty of rape?

The Bombing of Gaza and the Justification of Killing

2008-12-30T12:38:00.005Z

War is killing. I hesitate to use the word 'murder', as war rarely involves the deliberate killing of specific individuals; but it certainly is premeditated. We shouldn't let ourselves be fooled by phrases such as 'surgical strike' or 'avoidance of collateral damage'. When high-explosive bombs are dropped on densely populated civilian centres with the avowed intention of destroying missile-launching sites located there, the people ordering the attacks know full well that many civilians will be killed and injured. They are therefore intending those deaths.

Israel – or at least, its government – is effectively claiming that its actions are motivated by self-defence: it is trying to prevent the killing of its own civilians by missiles launched on Israel from Gaza. In a court of law, however, a case of self-defence would have to prove that the actions taken were proportionate to the aim of eliminating the threat. For instance, if you were in an airport, and a terrorist or madman started firing a machine gun into the crowds of people on the side of the departure lounge where you were sitting, you couldn't say you were acting in self-defence if you got up and sprayed the other side of the lounge with machine-gun fire in order to eliminate the attacker: you'd have to prove you were aiming at the gunman alone and that you had a reasonable chance of killing him. Israel cannot claim that it is aiming at the missile sites alone, as the means it is deploying to eliminate them are more akin to the spray machine gunning: deliberately intending to cause loss of life to surrounding people. Similarly, the fact that Hamas redoubled its attacks on Israel in the wake of the Israeli bombing raids would tend to indicate that Israel has not succeeded in its aim of preventing those attacks. If indeed that was its aim. Guilty, m'lud.

But guilty of what? In a way, what you call it is irrelevant: murder, killing, homicide, self-defence, genocide. Whatever word you use inevitably carries overtones that then get wrapped up into either a justification for the acts in question or a condemnation of them. The more you try to build your understanding of the facts around such words and narratives, the more you risk blinding yourself to the brute reality: that innocent people are dying and suffering in a horrifying manner, and in large numbers. You have to think of them as individuals, families and communities. Think of them as your neighbours, because that's what they are: the next-door post office and its customers, all wiped out; the people who live across the green and their Labrador puppy, bought for the little daughter (also dead) for Christmas; the passengers on the No. 9 bus going shopping – all killed apart from Johnny, who's now an orphan. If someone thought fit to drop bombs on your street and your community because they thought you were harbouring a terrorist bomb factory, would they be justified? Use your imagination, picture the horror, think of your loved-ones and acquaintances lying dead and bloodied in what was once your home; and then say it's justified. Think of it as yourself: would your death be justified in stopping a deranged fanatic living in your neighbourhood from attacking some other neighbours of yours? Would you be willing to die if you thought your death might prevent someone else in the neighbouring town from dying? Which option would you choose?

Of course, the Israelis say, 'well, what about our communities and citizens who are getting killed and injured by Hamas's missiles?'. Well, yes, and that's not justified, either; but two wrongs don't make a right. As I said above, if the claim of self-defence is to stand, then it has to be proven that the measures taken are proportionate and effective. Prima facie, the overwhelming evidence appears to be that they're not. And the assessment is similar if you use the criteria for a just war: you have to prove that the evil you are trying to put an end to is so overwhelming that it justifies the by definition evil means taken to end it; but those means are justified only if you don't escalate the evil you yourself are perpetrating – particularly, through the mass killing of non-combatants, which immediately rules it out – and the end itself can be achieved by your actions. Again, not proven.

In any case, the point I am trying to make is that the justifications that tend to be advanced for this sort of thing are designed to blind people to the realities involved by substituting a logic of means and ends for empathy with terrible human suffering. If you were to experience at first hand the reality of death and destruction – on both sides of the Gazan border – especially if it were your loved-ones who were the victims, you wouldn't say, 'well, our Israeli / our Palestinian neighbours were right to do this to try to put an end to our attacks on Israel / our oppression of the Palestinian people'. The question of who is in the right, and whose life is worth more than another's, often just boils down to which side of the border or other divide you're on. The reality is people are dying on both sides; and the question should be 'how can we stop this', not 'how can we justify our killing while condemning theirs?' The way to stop it is through peace. And the way to peace is not a life for a life, or in this instance ten lives for a life or whatever the ratio is. Peace can come only through a massive and mutual effort towards reconciliation, forgiveness and atonement. But I can't see much prospect of that right now.

The same false logic of justifying killing by reference to a suffering it is ostensibly intended to end is employed in other circumstances where we try to circumvent the commandment 'thou shalt not kill'. In the cases of abortions and stem-cell research, for instance, defenders of such practices claim they are justified because they will prevent suffering: that of the unwanted child, the unwilling mother or sick persons for whom new treatments could be discovered. Such 'ends justify the means' arguments again help to blind us to the reality of the killing involved, which is personal, dirty and bloody: the beautiful, wonderful human embryo or foetus that could have developed into a baby capable of surviving and thriving outside the womb, but instead is destroyed to suit our own purposes – and just as much a human being as you or I, whether inside or outside the womb or test tube. Again, we must employ the 'what if it were me?' test: 'would my parents have been right to have me aborted if they hadn't wanted me?' Most people, I think, would prefer to have been born, albeit amid troubled personal circumstances, than to have been denied the chance of life. And yet, we think we're justified in denying the same chance to millions of living unborn humans aborted every year. 'It's not killing, it's "termination", we try to say'; but whatever terminology we try to wrap it up in, it's killing all the same. And does the trauma a mother might experience about an unwanted pregnancy really outweigh the fact of taking another human being's life; and if so, by what code of ethics? And who gives us the right to decree that an unwanted child will have such a miserable life that we're actually showing mercy by preventing them from being born? This is pure bad faith designed to assuage our consciences. How do we know a child born in such circumstances won't end up being loved and cherished, even if not by ourselves? And does the aim of preventing diseases really justify creating human embryos (living human beings) purely for the purpose of extracting stem cells from them and thereby destroying them – especially if this prevents us from developing other methods to achieve the same ends? 'It's research, science and progress', we say; yes, and it's also killing.

The irony is that the same people who defend abortions or stem-cell research often reject other forms of killing, for some of which a more credible justification could arguably be put together. I always remember the Labour MP for Hampstead and former actress Glenda Jackson saying she was as ardently in favour of the 'right' of women to have abortions as she was ardently opposed to capital punishment. And yet, capital punishment for people guilty of murder or other violent crimes is superficially a far more proportionate act than taking the life of a totally innocent human being, albeit an unborn one. However, we deny that abortion does represent human-killing, partly because we can't or won't see the unborn human – hidden in its mother's womb – as a real, living human being (and certainly not as a 'citizen' with rights) in the same way as a visible, clearly separate and independent, sentient human being and citizen, such as a murderer. But this is just a lack of 'vision', in both senses: because we can't see the unborn human as a living human, we can't or won't accept the ending of that life as killing. But it was human and alive, and our own life started in that form; and our decision to abort it ends that life. That's killing by any definition.

In a similar way, many people who favour stem-cell research are opposed to vivisection and drug testing on animals. Again, the 'logic' is astounding: it's OK to destroy human life for the purposes of medical research if that human life is far removed from how we imagine and perceive human beings as fully human, and as having full human rights (as born, living-breathing-moving beings of flesh and blood), but not fully grown animals that clearly are capable of experiencing pain. Admitted, the embryos in question may not – may not – feel pain when they are manipulated and destroyed in the test tube, or even when they are injected with animal genes. But they were human and alive, and now they're not: that's human-killing, whatever gloss or justification you put on it. They could have been implanted in a womb and could have grown into normal babies; but they were destroyed to help alleviate the sickness of other human beings, whose suffering is clearly thought more important than their deaths.

Now, I personally am not in favour of capital punishment. In fact, I think this is another case where human societies attempt to justify their murderous desire to circumvent the divine commandment not to kill; in this case, by dressing it up as a 'proportionate' punishment that fits the crime. But this is the same talion logic (eye for an eye, life for a life) that the Israelis are employing in Gaza. Does the taking of one innocent life exonerate the killing of those responsible, with the distinction that in the case of Gaza, the Israelis are taking so many innocent lives as well? If you sanction the execution of violent criminals, then you have reduced yourself to their level; and the violence and evil that led them to commit their crimes has taken hold of you. In the case of Gaza, we can see that the danger is that the cycle of mutual violence and hatred is perpetuated. In the case of crimes such as murder, can the rage and grief of the victim's loved-ones ever really be assuaged, and in some sense neutralised and 'dealt with', by taking the life of the person responsible, assuming society has identified the correct person? Is this really better for those loved-ones than long-term imprisonment? Killing the guilty person removes any possibility for those surviving the murdered individual to come to any understanding of, and maybe eventually forgiveness for, the crime; and it certainly eliminates any chance that the murderer themself may come to repent of their crime and seek reconciliation with the bereaved, albeit that that repentance should be accompanied, indeed facilitated, by a long period of atonement and of paying for the crime. Such an outcome has to be the hope of any Christian society; and is the only way that the murder of one person can in time lead to new life and hope for all affected, rather than death taking hold in the mind, hearts and actions of killer and victims alike.

Another example of this tendency to selectively justify killing (i.e. one form of killing, such as stem-cell research, is OK but others are not) is what's now referred to as 'assisted dying' (formerly known as 'assisted suicide' and, before that, euthanasia). Again, some people who are vehemently in favour of abortion or stem-cell research are opposed to assisted dying, which arguably has much stronger claims to being justified. Only the other day, Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, went on record as saying that he was opposed to bringing in legislation to allow relatives and medical staff to assist those suffering from painful, long-term chronic conditions from taking their own lives. And yet, he was firmly behind the recent Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which continues to sanction abortions in certain cases up to 28 weeks into the pregnancy and the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for the purpose of experimentation, alongside conventional stem-cell research. At one point, it even looked as though Brown would insist that Catholic Labour MPs should toe the party line and support the bill, which would involve voting against their consciences. However, he eventually backed down.

From my perspective, such late abortions and the experimental tampering with human embryos, and indeed with the human genome, are far more horrendous and human life-denying than enabling people suffering acute pain and terminal conditions to take their own lives. At least, in the latter instance, the death is chosen and self-inflicted by the person affected, rather than being perpetrated upon helpless, silent, unborn humans. All the same, it's still killing, as the increasingly euphemistic expressions employed negatively testify: they try to distance us and blind us ever more to the reality of killing involved.

But is this 'justified killing'. Well, the point I've been trying to make is that killing can and always will be justified: we'll always come up with words, arguments and explanations that sanction killing in one set of circumstances or another. But it's still killing, and it still contravenes the commandment 'thou shalt not kill'. The focus tends to be placed on the sick individuals seeking to end their lives; and understandably so. But in assisted dying, this still involves other people consenting to that death and effectively carrying it out, or at least 'conspiring' in it. And those individuals will have to answer for that killing, if not in a court of law, then maybe in another tribunal. The commandment is clear; and I don't think a plea of 'well, I never believed in all that religion malarkey' will necessarily wash. And even if that final judgement never comes, there's still the tribunal of conscience; and that still small voice that says 'killing is killing' and 'you have killed'.

We can justify our killing as much as we like; but in our hearts, we know it's killing, all the same.

Faith, Homosexuality and Vocation

2008-04-25T23:42:00.007Z

If there's one thing evangelical-Christian and Islamic fundamentalists agree on, it is the moral 'depravity' of homosexuality. They agree on this point at least, even if some of their proponents reserve almost the same degree of condemnation for each other as they do for gay sex! If two credos that regard each other as so erroneous can still agree on the gay issue, then either they are both wrong about homosexuality or wrong in their judgements about each other. Either way, this on its own does not inspire confidence that their precepts concerning sexuality are always well grounded in faith terms.

In fact, however, there are many more areas of agreement on morals between strict, conservative Christians and devout Muslims; for instance, on the pivotal importance of the family and the roles of the sexes, with authority being invested in the male head of the household, or indeed of the church or the mosque. One could also mention the importance of regular communal prayer; of Sunday or Friday worship; the sacredness with which the little actions and rituals of daily life, particularly of home and hearth, are endowed; the importance of cleanliness and physical modesty, reflecting the sanctity of the bodily temple housing our immortal soul; and the reverence towards the Holy Book, whether Bible or Qur'an.

These characteristics of the world's two leading faiths are in fact common to all the world's great religions: orthodox Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists all cherish these sacred, ritualistic and religiously prescribed features of daily, family life, and particularly the sanctity of the bond that unites husband and wife. And they all in different ways condemn active homosexuality as a 'sin'.

Perhaps, then, if the religions to which the great majority of humanity to some extent adheres all agree on the essentials of what constitutes a holy life, and all repudiate gay sex, there may be something in it. Either that, or they're all wrong - which is the understandable response of many gay persons. But my point is that maybe what is 'wrong' and 'sinful' about gay sexual activity needs to be seen in relation to the call or vocation to a holy life that all religions are essentially there to articulate and direct. Can a life in which a person asserts and enacts his or her 'right' to an active gay sex life truly be said to be 'holy'?

It seems almost oxymoronic to pose the question in this form. But this is perhaps precisely because the two categories - holiness and active homosexuality - are mutually inconsistent. Christian or Muslim conservatives cannot conceive that a gay sex life could have any place in a life dedicated to seeking God's will and striving to grow in holiness. Conversely, defenders of gay lifestyles and relationships - even religious liberals - never (at least, in my experience) claim that gay sex could be the expression of any sort of religious vocation: that God him- or herself is actually calling two people of the same sex to dedicate their lives to one another and express their mutual love in sexual activity. There may indeed be people and religious communities that celebrate such a view; but this sort of thinking certainly does not form part of the pro-gay mainstream, whether religious or not: gay rights are not advocated in the name of holiness.

Maybe this is how the 'sinfulness' of active homosexuality should be described: that it is inconsistent with a life of wholehearted dedication to seeking the will of God; with our religious vocation to holiness. In other words, an active gay lifestyle could be something that prevents an individual from being fully open and responsive to what God is calling them to: his infinitely loving purpose for that person's life here on earth and throughout eternity. This is because the gay person may be putting what 'I want'- even if that is to express love for someone of the same sex in a physical way - ahead of what God wants. In one sense, it's not the 'wanting' gay sex that is the problem but the structuring of a life around the satisfaction of those wants - rather than around the carrying out of God's will to the best of our ability, as we are able to discern it.

If the absence of any defence of the gay lifestyle in the name of holiness - which is not to say that actively gay people can't be generally good people and even good Christians; just that the gay sex itself is not holy - is an implicit recognition that it is not a holy way of life, why is this so? On one level, paradoxically, I'd argue that this not because of any 'inherent' sinfulness of homosexuality per se; and indeed, the Catholic Church does not teach that it is sinful to have a homosexual orientation and even the desires that flow from it, but merely to indulge in those desires in thought or deed in such a way that they override one's Christian duties. The 'non-holiness' of gay sex is the same as the non-holiness of any sexual activity that takes place without reference to the properly sacred character that sex is intended by God to have within marriage: as an expression, manifestation and acting out of God's undying love and commitment to us human beings through all our weaknesses and faults; a love which also is at the origin of all new created life, and present with us at and beyond the end of our mortal lives - meaning that marriage is an essential, consecrated means, established by God, for us as human beings to participate in his creative and redemptive work.

The sexual act is meant to be sacred, and in marriage that purpose is consecrated: sacred both in the divine love and grace for which it is a chosen vessel and, integral to that, in the new human life that is intended to arise from it. The gay sexual lifestyle can no more partake of this sacredness than can a straight relationship outside of marriage; which is not to say that those extra-marital relationships are not in their own way sacred and carry duties on the part the individuals involved towards each other. But these are not consecrated, sacramental, unions - not, therefore, unions as such: expressive of the very sacred, mystical union of Christ with humanity - through his birth, death and resurrection - which transforms our mortal flesh into a vessel of new life.

Sex, through marriage, is therefore intended by its creator to be part of a consecrated life, just as every part of our life and all our actions, for the devout Christian or Muslim, should be part a constant act of prayer and praise to God. Extra-marital sex, even gay sex, is of course not the only way in which we Christians (I can't really speak for Muslims) constantly fail to fully live out our vocation - but continue to be forgiven, held and revived through the mercy and grace of God. As such, gay sex - if allied to a predominantly caring, faithful and loving life - is not deserving of the special condemnation, indeed vilification, it receives from those whose own lives so often are not exemplary. Indeed, oftentimes, we Christians have much to learn - when it comes to love - from those we tend to despise; whether gays or, indeed, Muslims.

Embryos, Persons and the Mind Of God

2008-04-01T23:41:00.007Z

“What one always has to bear in mind is that it’s the children that should come first - not chronologically or causally in this instance, of course, but in our thinking about what ultimately is in the mind of God for his children, as ‘our’ children have lived in his mind for all eternity. Does he want our children to be born of a father and a mother, and to grow up in the love of their father and mother? There can be no doubt, from the perspective of Christian faith, that the answer to this question is ‘yes’”.

The above is a quote from a post of mine on another blog. There it inspired a couple of comments, one of which was to the effect that if it was in God’s mind to bring children into this world through the loving union of a father and mother, wouldn’t he just do this? My reply - paraphrasing myself - was essentially ‘no’: it might be God’s will that this should happen, but our sin impedes and distorts God’s will, and must therefore be allowed to damage creation (if our freedom to choose evil as well as good is to be genuine); and that God could not arbitrarily alter the laws of biology he had made to reflect and express his loving purpose in creation simply to prevent us from abusing those laws to create and destroy human life without regard to the moral law.

This got me thinking about how we live in the mind of God, both during our temporal existence as living and breathing human beings, and in His eternity (which we view from our time-bound perspective as ‘before’ and ‘after’ our mortal lives). And how does that relate to our human personhood, and the ethics of human reproduction and embryo research?

My point is this: from the perspective of faith, human life by definition is always personal in the sense that it is an embodiment - a bodily image or reproduction - of the personhood of God himself: Father, Son and the love of the Spirit that unites them and gives rise to the whole of creation as the expression and reflection of the divine love and self-understanding (the Word). In this light, insofar as any actual human life form comes into existence, it necessarily has this essential personal character - as part of its DNA, one might say. This is the case from the moment of conception: the human person that has lived in the mind of God for all eternity now also lives in a time-bound, physical form. The Concept (the Word) has manifested itself in a material body: conception; the Word becomes flesh; a human being is made in God’s image. That human personhood is therefore as complete in a single fertilised ovum or a collection of undifferentiated embryonic stem cells as it is in a newborn baby or mature adult: alive, and able to survive and prosper outside the womb.

When I say that this intrinsic personhood of human life is built into our ‘DNA’, this is also a reference to the fact that, with respect to our genetic inheritance, we are all the expression and product of the union of our biological father and mother, even if the loving moral and spiritual union of our father and mother that God wills for us was absent from the specific biological process of our conception. God loves us into being even when love is absent from the human reproductive processes involved.

Those who attempt to morally justify embryonic stem-cell research seek to do so by denying that undifferentiated embryonic cells do constitute a ‘human person’ or ‘human being’ that might have rights similar to those of born human beings or even foetuses, such as the right to life; the right not to have medical experiments conducted on one’s body / person against one’s will; or the right not to have one’s fundamental genetic structure manipulated and combined with that of other species. It is doubtless scientifically and descriptively true - looking at the question from a materialist perspective - that a collection of undifferentiated embryonic cells does not (yet) have the characteristics that one tends to think of as defining personhood: the beginning of the formation of a recognisably human body, with all the immensely complex variety of cell and tissue types, and bodily organs.

But firstly, the religious - or certainly, the Catholic Christian - moral objection to stem-cell research is not based on such a definition of personhood: the bodily characteristics that appear to denote our status as human beings and persons are in a sense only the ‘outer’ material form of our personhood that in essence lives and exists in God. Once those cells exist, a human person that lives in the mind of God has begun to unfold in time and space, and to reveal and be a small but integral part of God’s loving creative and redemptive purpose.

Secondly, from a purely logical perspective, it is quite arbitrary to declare that after, say, 14 days from conception, what had previously been regarded as a mere collection of undifferentiated cells is now to be regarded as an embryonic human person with rights that it did not have during the first two weeks of its existence. The embryonic person would not exist now had it not gone through 14, or however many, days of undifferentiated-cell existence. This is a continuous process; and to declare that in the later stages of its development, the embryo has a humanity or personhood (humanity defined as personhood) that it did not have in the necessary earlier stages that went before seems completely illogical and self-serving; and it flies in the face of our intuitive perception of when our lives as human persons begin: from the moment of conception when the DNA structures that define who we are started to be laid down.
Besides which, the time limit from which embryos and foetuses are recognised as human beings or persons with legal and human rights is arbitrarily moveable depending on the purpose that is being justified: 14 days in UK legislation with respect to regulating stem-cell research, but 24 weeks when it comes to the legal limit for abortions. When does an unborn human person become a full human being and, as it were, a citizen with full legal rights? It appears to be the case that what defines the threshold for an embryo or foetus to be recognised in law as a human person in this way is merely the point at which they become physically (visually) recognisable as viable, autonomous human entities from the particular perspective that is invoked: that of the medical researcher who recognises that, beyond a certain point, he is extracting cells not from an amorphous, undifferentiated mass but from an actual living embryo that is starting to take on the visual, albeit microscopic, form of a human body and person; or the perspective of medical practice and childbirth, where the 24-week abortion limit was based on the latest stage at which a foetus could not survive if plucked untimely from the womb - a time limit which, for that very reason, is being revised in the current UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, as medical advances have made it possible for foetuses to survive from an earlier age.

This really is a rather primitive and, indeed, material, irrational and superstitious way to decide when an unborn human entity becomes a human person: simply when it corresponds to our bodily image of a human being - paradoxically defining the humanness of unborn life purely in relation to the appearances and conditions for survival of born life. The unborn clearly don’t stand a chance if the odds are so heavily weighted against them. In reality, the vision of faith and the science in this matter fundamentally concur; at least when the science is logically understood as describing a process whereby recognisable bodily-human personhood (what we think of as our existence and personhood) necessarily begins in the undifferentiated (’unrecognisably’ human) embryonic stem-cell state. If we are living human beings and persons now, that is because what we are now was already laid down and was potential within what we were from the moment of our conception - and, in the light of faith, within the eternal mind of God.

This is why, for me, it is so revealing that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which has provoked such heated debate in the UK during the last week owing to prime minister Gordon Brown’s initial refusal to allow his Labour Party MPs a free vote on its morally controversial aspects, should sanction such diverse measures as the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for the purposes of stem-cell research, and the removal of a legal reference to the ‘need for a father’ on the part of children born to Lesbian couples through IVF or other assisted-conception treatment. This latter provision extends to the very birth certificate of such children, in which it will now be possible for both women to be registered as the real (biological) parents, even if neither of them actually are the genetic parents (for instance, if a fertilised egg from another couple is used as opposed to IVF using the eggs of one of the women). This means that such children are officially without a father. They retain their existing legal right to try and trace their genetic father as soon as they reach the age of maturity (18 in the UK); but they will never be allowed to officially recognise that person as their true father - in the eyes of the law, he becomes a ‘mere’ sperm donor and no more.

The thread that these two measures in the Bill have in common is that they involve a denial of those two aspects of unborn human life that are fundamental from its very beginning: that it is personal and a product of the union of a man and a woman, in the sense that, from conception, the human entity is an individuated, unique and living combination of the DNA of its parents - DNA which in turn defines their personhood. And from the faith perspective, the unborn human being is also of course sacred: a living human person ultimately made by God in his image, which we are therefore commanded to respect and protect. And such is, not just the vocation of the believer, but the true calling of science: not so much to determine the ‘mind of God’ through empirical and theoretical enquiry into the material world that is in God but is not God; but to seek ways to cure the ills of our mortal existence that do not violate the purity and beauty of human life that is called in Christ to share God’s mind and love for all eternity.

Love of God or Love of Self: Homosexuality, Christian Ethics and Social Mores

2007-09-21T08:42:00.000Z

They had Graeme Le Saux, the former England international footballer, on BBC Radio Four's Today programme on Tuesday of this week. He was talking about how, as a player, he was the object of innumerable insults and taunting for supposedly being gay, which he claims not to be. In 2002, I was present at a Spurs vs. Chelsea match where the Spurs home supporters did indeed mercilessly mock Le Saux for his gayness. I should add that this didn't prevent him from, as they say, playing a blinder and scoring the final goal in Spurs' 4-0 defeat – much to my chagrin at the time!

On the Today programme, Le Saux – who was promoting his autobiography – made the point that it is somewhat ridiculous and out-of-date that there should be such hostility and prejudice towards gays in the footballing world given that there is now so much openness and acceptance of homosexuality in all walks of life. On one level, this is of course true: dressing-room insinuations about a player colleague's sexuality smack of immature schoolboy humour, and there is clearly safety in a crowd in singing homophobic anthems from the stands.

On the other hand, football is one of the few heterosexual male-only preserves in our culture, and many of the men who play or watch the game would like to keep it that way. If they join in the gay-baiting, they are obviously in the wrong; but are they entirely wrong in feeling the way they do? It is the most natural thing in the world, or at least in human cultures, for men to seek heterosexual male-only activities as the occasion for so-called male bonding. In a culture in which women have increasingly – and justly so – asserted their rights to participate and compete in areas of society that were previously a male preserve, many ordinary straight men – not people one would think of as being reactionary or homophobic – feel inhibited from seeking and enjoying safe outlets for a bit of 'harmless' macho aggression, such as football.

But we're talking about attitudes to gay men here, not women. Well, yes and no. The point is football serves the purposes of straight male bonding: providing an outlet for men not just to display aggression but also affection for each other that is not tinged by other sorts of feelings. In English society, men are particularly inept at expressing their feelings of friendship for one another; so this typically needs to be enabled by a context that both draws men together in a common cause and allows them to behave in a way that demonstrates to their companions that they are masculine and straight – for example (but not necessarily) by making lewd remarks about women and derogatory remarks about gays. Clearly, gays are not welcome in such a 'club' of like-minded, red-blooded males. And if a member of the opposite club (i.e. the other team) can be insulted for their inadequacies as a man and put off their game by being slagged off as gay, then all the better. So while instances of homophobic chanting such as that directed towards Graeme Le Saux in the game I watched are clearly unacceptable and distressing, they could also be described simply as a group of men venting a bit of non-physically violent aggression and finding any excuse to jeer at their tribal rivals.

Hence, football provides for many men the opportunity to celebrate masculine prowess and enjoy male friendships in a way that poses no threat to their sexual orientation or gender identity. The growing involvement of women in the game probably adds to the feelings of anxiety that this male preserve is being encroached upon; it's just that gays, in traditional male society, are a more acceptable object of derision than women. Football is one example of more general anxieties felt by men to a varying degree, whereby the growing equality of women with men is perceived as leading to an increasing masculinisation of women (becoming physically stronger, socially more powerful and sexually more assertive) and a corresponding feminisation of men: encouraged to get more in touch with their feelings – traditionally thought of as a weakness; increasingly displaced by women from positions of power, e.g. in business, the family and the Church; and finding themselves presented as the (often inadequate, derided) object of feminine desire – or of gay desire.

This general cultural context provides a backdrop for understanding last week's expulsion of the middle-aged comedian Jim Davidson from the ITV reality-TV show Hells Kitchen. This was brought about by him asking the gay contestant Brian why 'shirt lifters' such as him always put on a particular camp facial expression. Brian took umbrage at the supposed homophobia of Davidson's words; and the comedian appeared to only add insult to injury when he later attempted to apologise by saying he understood where Brian was coming from and that he knew that GAY stood for 'as good as you'. Judging from the reactions of Brian and other contestants, this was clearly perceived as constituting another slur on gay people: either because it imputed to them an aggressive over-assertion of their rights (as Adele, the chief defender of Brian said, the correct phrase should be 'equal to you'); or because it was interpreted as being a sarcasm. Davidson was promptly asked to leave the show by its producers, as they couldn't risk the situation getting out of hand and generating a barrage of viewer complaints and regulatory criticism such as those which resulted from the so-called Shilpa Shetty racism row in Celebrity Big Brother earlier in the year (see my post of 23 February, The Amoral Market and the Randomness of Reward).

But were Davidson's remarks homophobic? I didn't think so. They were in keeping with Jim Davidson's comic style, characterised by humour appealing to the traditional male heterosexual audience: lots of jokes about gays and women. But Davidson is clearly used to getting as good as he gives; and in his circle, which indeed includes lots of gay performers, he would expect a remark such as his to be reciprocated with an equally cutting, sarcastic response – for instance, turning around the phrase 'shirt lifter' into a derogatory remark about middle-aged 'skirt lifters'. Instead, Brian just went into a wounded sulk, and some of the younger participants who thought Davidson had been completely out of order clearly did not understand or appreciate the humorous intent behind his comments. The point was that Davidson had overstepped the mark of acceptability. The goalposts have moved since Davidson was in his prime in the 1980s. Now, anything that implies hostility towards the inclusion and advancement of gays and women in roles traditionally reserved for straight men (such as the very masculine professional chef in Hells Kitchen, Marco Pierre White; or indeed, the stand-up comedian) is strictly taboo. Never mind that Brian, according to Davidson, had made a catalogue of unrepeatable remarks to him (not broadcast). Brian is a performer and comedian – his comedy and sexual insinuations are acceptable; Davidson's macho heterosexual humour is not.

The question about precisely where the boundaries of acceptability lie in relation to homosexuality is a really crucial one, for society and the Church. Leaving aside the related issue of how acceptable are ostensibly harmless, playful manifestations of macho behaviour and attitudes in general, there is a serious question about the extent to which 'public opinion' is now prepared to tolerate expressions of criticism, opposition or unease in relation to active homosexuality. For instance, is the taunting of supposed gays by football crowds really as bad as racist chants and obscenities, as Graeme Le Saux claimed? Liberal opinion would doubtless say that it is; but there is a difference between trying to wind up a player from the opposing team by mocking them as gay – when most people probably realise this isn't in fact true – and deriding someone for their ethnicity, which is an inescapable fact. The former is more an expression of aggressive support for the team, allied to ridicule of something that challenges heterosexual maleness; the latter is primarily an expression of real hatred.

An example of the shifting boundaries of acceptability in this area that is more far-reaching in its implications is the issue of adoption by gay couples, which has been the subject of several posts in this blog (see, for example, my post of 11 September). One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the whole stand off between the Church and the political establishment on this question towards the start of this year is that it demonstrates that it has become increasingly unacceptable in secular society to treat gay and lesbian people in any way differently from straight persons based on a moral condemnation of the gay lifestyle. If the decisions of our legislators do in fact reflect the general consensus of opinion, the eventual passing of the Equality Act without any special exemption for Christian adoption agencies could be taken as showing that the Church's moral beliefs about homosexuality are no longer shared by – indeed, are unacceptable to – the majority.

Another way to put this is that the civic and judicial principles of equality and human rights have encroached on another piece of the Church's traditional terrain: what the Church, along with the majority of society, has previously condemned as morally wrong is now declared as a human right; and gay sexual relationships (and by extension, the suitability of gay couples to become adoptive parents) are considered in effect to be morally equal to straight relationships, whether formalised in marriage or not.

It's worth observing at this point that this 'moral equality' corresponds more to an idea that gay relationships are equivalent to / 'equally as valid' as (no less but equally no more valid as) straight ones than to an idea that they represent an intrinsic, positive moral good – in the way that heterosexual marriage and traditional family life are generally accepted as being good in themselves. And this is because human rights are not the same as the moral right: they are morally neutral and content-less, essentially because what they constitute is freedoms; and freedom in itself is not a moral value but is rather the condition for making truly moral choices. For example, most people would accept the proposition that citizens of a free country should have the right to commit adultery, and many regard it as a woman's right to abort unwanted foetuses; but probably most people would regard both actions as not morally right – or at least, certainly not positively good. Similarly, while the majority may accept that it should be gay couples' right to adopt children, I doubt whether the majority believes this is better for most children than adoption by a father and mother – although it may in fact be better for some. Equally, it probably still is the majority view that homosexuality is not really 'normal' or 'natural' in quite the same way as heterosexuality – however these terms are defined – and, for this reason, gay relationships are not quite as 'wholesome', beautiful or conducive to true happiness as straight ones. But, partly out of sympathy for persons 'afflicted' in this way – and who therefore, it is thought, won't be able to have children – and partly out of guilt for society's past treatment of homosexuals, it is no longer acceptable to assimilate this sort of evaluation of homosexuality with any kind of moral judgement that it is 'wrong' or 'not as good as' heterosexuality. Or indeed the opposite of this: that homosexuality is as good as or better than heterosexuality. Any kind of valuation along the scale from good to evil is viewed as unacceptable; and an amoral equality suspends and takes the place of moral judgement. As Adele in Hells Kitchen put it, gay people are equal to straight, not as good as you, in Jim Davidson's words. From a traditional judgement that homosexuality is wrong, we've moved to a judgement that to make that moral judgement itself is wrong. But let's not dwell on the irony that it's the denizens of hell's kitchen who are the advocates of that view!

But do people really think that the traditional moral condemnation of homosexuality is wrong; or is it rather the case that it's just viewed as inappropriate to express it verbally and in one's actions? Jim Davidson's 'sin', as it were, was his perceived verbal violence towards Brian, viewed as a form of bullying and intimidation: he wasn't wrong to hold whatever views he does hold about gays; but he should have just kept them to himself. How can this be unpacked? Liberty and moral equality means that anyone is entitled to believe whatever they like and define their own morality. So, to be consistent, Davidson couldn't be condemned for his beliefs but only for the actions that flowed from them. These were seen as expressing an aggression directed against Brian's right to compete in Hells Kitchen and a slur on his personal morality.

These two ideas converge in the concepts of intrinsic human dignity and value. Because the secular-liberal ideas of rights and liberty are morally neutral, the concept that is used to transform them into positive moral values in their own right is that of the fundamental dignity and goodness of the human person. By making the universal dignity of the human person the place and source of moral goodness and value, this makes it impossible to make categorical moral judgements about a person based on their actual behaviour and desires. Whatever these may be, it is thought, they cannot impair the fundamental goodness of that person as a human being. That's why the liberal can morally condemn a person, rather than an action, only by labelling them as inhuman; and why psychopathic despots such as the Nazis can justify attempting to kill off whole races only by making them out to be sub-human.

The point of this is that any moral judgement, real or imagined, of someone that is associated with a characteristic viewed as defining them as a human being (e.g. homosexuality) is taken by the liberal – insofar as it is a moral judgement – as an attack on the dignity of that person, not a criticism of the morality of their behaviour or desires. Making jokes about 'gay shirt lifters' is an attack on them for being gay not a wry observation about their shirt lifting, which may contain a germ of truth. And the more that gay persons – and justly so – take a stand on their common humanity and equality, the more it becomes impossible to morally criticise any of their actions without appearing to condemn them as persons.

This presents a problem for the Church, which has always made a distinction between condemning the sin but not the sinner: it's not wrong for a person to be gay, but it is wrong for them to indulge in and act upon their desires. While there is a valid logical and ethical distinction between judging a person and judging their actions, in practice, it is often hard to tell them apart. The Church greatly contributes to society's perception that it condemns gay people for being gay rather than for their behaviour through the logic and tone of the language it uses to set out its position and teaching. Let's take the case of the opposition of some in the US Episcopalian Church to that Church's ordination / consecration of openly gay priests / bishops and the blessing of gay unions, chronicled in an interesting article this week in the Wall Street Journal. The terms in which the condemnation of such priests and unions is often expressed both logically and implicitly involve judging the person as well as their actions. The bone of contention is not just that some of the priests involved are in gay sexual relationships but that they are 'openly gay'. But, of course, you can be openly gay without being sexually active. The controversial gay bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, claimed that his gay partnership was 'celibate' / non-sexually active. It is as if the Church really is perpetrating what liberal defenders of gay rights and the likes of Brian perceive to be the case: that their moral criticism of behaviour implies impugning the dignity and goodness of the person as gay.

This impression is certainly supported by the lurid tone and imagery that's often used. The above Wall Street Journal article refers to the belief in the Ugandan Church, where dissident Episcopalian clergy have been consecrated as bishops, that homosexual acts are Satanic. By inference, one cannot imagine they would have too understanding a reaction to anyone, ordained or not, who came out as gay, even if they were committed to leading a celibate life. Do the conservative Episcopalians really wish to align themselves with such opinions? But they are not that far removed from the language and attitudes of conservative Christians of all denominations, and not just in the USA, some of whom draw support from the Old Testament teaching (as quoted by the Wall Street Journal article), “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination”.

Such views about homosexuality, active or not, are simply not shared by most people in Western societies and, arguably, by most Christians in those societies, too. Would any reasonable person not in fact think that using this sort of language implies a repudiation of homosexuality per se as well as an objection to homosexual behaviour, especially as many churches clearly don't bother too much to make this ethical distinction in the first place? If you regard gay sex as Satanic, then an openly gay person must logically be seen as being under the influence of Satan; which can then lead to the attempts made by some churches to 'exorcise' or 'heal' gay persons of their homosexuality. And it is also an obvious observation that even rational ethical teaching critical towards homosexuality can provide a 'safe' outlet for expressing a characteristically heterosexual repugnance towards the idea of gay sex acts, which strictly speaking has nothing to do with ethics. The fact, for instance, that you personally might find the idea of gay anal sex abhorrent doesn't of itself validate your belief that it is morally wrong; but the belief that it is morally wrong can provide an apparently reasonable justification for expressing homophobic feelings about it.

Even the more rational and tradition-heavy language used by the Catholic Church in its teaching about homosexuality presents huge difficulties in terms of bolstering the liberal view that the Church is simply stuck in the Dark Ages in its thinking in this area. For example, the use of the term 'unnatural' to describe gay sex is extremely difficult to explain or justify to non-believers. In two major respects, this classification is viewed by serious secular opinion as being completely inappropriate to describe homosexuality. Firstly, according to the empirical-scientific understanding of nature, homosexuality is a completely natural phenomenon: a universal characteristic of human societies and psycho-sexuality throughout the ages, for which many possible explanations have been brought forward by both the natural and human sciences. Secondly, from a philosophical point of view, the term 'natural' is regarded as highly problematic and relative. What any given society regards as natural is viewed as being determined to a very large extent – but not necessarily exclusively – by contingent cultural factors: it used to be thought unnatural for women to want to pursue careers, but now it's not; similarly, it used to be thought in Western societies that homosexuality was unnatural, but now it's largely not.

But when the Church uses the concepts of natural / unnatural, it's using them in a different sense from these secular understandings of the terms. The Church is of course referring to the concept of the divine Order of creation, lost through sin, and restored in Christ. Homosexuality, in this context, is considered unnatural because it goes against the purpose for which sexuality was made: to be the means through which human beings are called to share in God's creation of new life, making the union of husband and wife an objective, real union with and in Christ. And this is not, as is often thought, merely about procreation. God's work of bringing new life into being that married persons are called to share relates to the entirety of the cycle of creation and redemption in Christ: not just bringing a new human being into this world and into the life of the sin-bound flesh; but helping to bring them into the new and everlasting life of the Spirit, into which this life is but a slow and painful process of being born.

Sexuality is therefore intrinsically linked to our Christian vocation: to a calling to be led by God into a life of holiness and of the Spirit that ultimately transcends the needs, desires and values of a merely material world. The Order of nature from which homosexual behaviour is said to fall short – to be 'disordered' – therefore refers not primarily to the empirical nature of the scientists or the culturally specific world of the socio-anthropologists, but to a creation restored to union with God in Christ, of which this present, secular world is but a patchy blueprint.

Without a clear presentation of this metaphysical context for Christian beliefs about the role and place of sexuality, the teaching on homosexuality cannot fail to appear to be merely a form of outdated prejudice flying in the face of objectively observable fact. Simply discussing the issues using terms such as unnatural and disordered – because they are regarded as just not epistemologically accurate – then appears intellectually uncritical and homophobic. The Church must find contemporary language to put across its precious spiritual inheritance: not by changing the traditional teaching but translating and presenting it in clearer, more modern terms.

For starters, the Church has to overcome the impression that its teaching is that heterosexuality in general (however it is expressed) is of itself natural / good, and homosexuality (whether actively expressed or not) is always unnatural / evil. According to my understanding, at least, of Church doctrine on the order of nature as creation, the opposition is really between sex within marriage [good, holy] and (gay or straight) extra-marital sex [sinful, unholy], not between heterosexual and homosexual sex. Extra-marital heterosexual sex is to be considered unnatural and disordered, in a similar manner to homosexual sex, because it is a case of the couple using sex for their own gratification and purposes (which could even include having children) in a manner that is closed off from the life in Christ of which their loving sexual union is intended by God to be seal and symbol: a bringing together of the dual creative and redemptive work of Christ – creation of a new human being in the flesh and a commitment on the part of the couple to share in Christ's loving work of redemption and spiritual rebirth in that child.

According to this view, becoming involved in a sexual relationship (gay or straight) outside of the divine purpose for which sex was created necessarily leads to a person being drawn away from their vocation to a life of holiness and dedication to the loving service of God. For unmarried persons – some straight persons and, by definition, all gay persons – this vocation can therefore be lived out fully only in a celibate life. But, by the same logic, most people haven't attained true holiness yet and, therefore, many cannot sustain celibacy; and, indeed, it is unsustainable without dedication to a life of holiness and spiritual conversion. Therefore, we should be very wary about appearing to condemn sexually active gay individuals – whether avowedly Christian or not – unless we are prepared to condemn ourselves for our own misdemeanours, including the all-too frequent deviations from sexual holiness (chastity) on the part of married or unmarried straight persons: lusting after persons other than one's spouse; indulging in conjugal sex that is not open to the creative-redemptive purpose God intends for it; infidelities and one-night stands; etc. Judge not lest ye be judged.

Therefore, the Church has to find a language to put across the context of the call to holiness and to a new life in Christ and in the Spirit that is the foundation of its teaching about homosexuality. It's not wrong to be gay; but acting upon, and building one's life around, the desires that being gay induces can lead one away from knowing and loving God – from the meaning of life itself and the core of one's very being. Perhaps, in pastoral work and teaching, as well as referring to gay sex in the formal, doctrinal sense as unnatural and disordered, we could use terms such as 'alienated / alienating' (from one's true vocation); 'non-holy' (orientated towards material and temporal priorities, rather than eternal, spiritual ones); and 'non-vocational' (a gay life that ignores the traditional teaching about our Christian calling, rather than one which tries – albeit imperfectly – to conform itself to that teaching).

Moral objections to active homosexuality, if expressed in these or similar terms, and with reference to the full context of Christian belief, could begin to be understood as what they properly are: not an attack on but rather a defence of the person – a call for each of us to relinquish our self-love and, in so doing, embrace the love of God.

Gay Adoption and the Catholic Church: A Re-assessment

2007-09-11T22:03:00.000Z

9 September 2007

A fitting day, indeed, in which to reconsider this topic: Our Lady's birthday, according to the traditional calendar of the Church. I don't mean this in any sacrilegious sense: I'm a Catholic believer myself and have a devotion to Our Lady. As the spiritual mother of all humanity – so the Church teaches – the Blessed Virgin stands as a sign of the love and compassion we owe to all children, whether the fruit of our loins or not.

There's been a strange silence these past few months on the issue of the potential closure of the UK's Catholic adoption agencies, unwilling or unable to accept the terms of the 2006 Equality Act that might oblige them to take on gay and lesbian prospective adoptive parents. The public debate over, and the Act passed into law, everything has been covered with a veil of discretion as delicate discussions are doubtless held internally within the Church, and between the Church and government.

I myself wrote a number of posts on the subject in this blog earlier this year, culminating in two rather agonising, heartfelt pieces in March. The second of these pieces chronologically (dated 29 March) contained a rather intricate argument to the effect that the Church's position rests on a belief that sexually active gay persons do not have a 'right to become parents'. This conviction, according to my argument, was in turn based on the view that such persons' wish to become parents was invested in their 'unnatural' and non-life-giving sexual behaviour and, for that reason, was also unnatural and corrupted (indeed, corrupting) at root.

I contrasted this view with one whereby gay persons' sexual activity could be seen, to some extent, as not expressing their reproductive instinct and wish to have children; and that, accordingly, that instinct and that wish could be considered to be natural – indeed, God-given and inspired by the Holy Spirit – as opposed to their 'unnatural' sexual feelings and behaviour. Gay persons – not in general, but particular individuals or couples – could in this way potentially even be thought to have a vocation to adopt needy children: sharing in the work of Mother Church in giving life to her children through the love and power of the Spirit.

Several months further down the road, I'm beginning to think I might have got things slightly mixed up: not the overall thrust of the argument, but the understanding of the relationship between homosexuality and the reproductive instinct, and of the Church's position on that. I think now that the Church's teaching is actually closer to how I described these matters from my own perspective at that time: that in gay sex, the sexual feelings and activity become somehow dissociated, closed off, from the reproductive drive and the wish to create new life; and that therefore, sexual gratification becomes, for the individuals concerned, an aim in itself, separated from the procreative purpose which sexual activity is intended by God to fulfil.

Meanwhile, my own position has flipped over to one that's closer to how I described the basis for the Church's beliefs: that actually, all sexual desire and activity – including the 'gay' variety – does in fact express the individual's reproductive instinct and wish to become a parent, even if these drives are hidden in the innermost depths of their heart. However, far from this then vitiating gay persons' urge to procreate – even though expressed homosexually – this presents a basis for saying that everyone, gay persons included, has a natural and God-given predisposition to parenthood. This is part of our core, common humanity; part of our true nature as creatures made in the image of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: parent, child, and giver and receiver of love and life.

Objectors might ask how it is possible for gay desire and sexual activity to be manifestations of a natural urge to reproduce, when they are clearly incompatible with such an aim. But from an impulse or an action being incompatible with its alleged underlying cause or stimulus, one does not have to infer a different, 'real' motivation (e.g. that gay sex represents, indeed in part springs from, a deliberate rejection of reproductivity). What we do in life is so often inappropriate or counter-productive in relation to what we set out to achieve, particularly so in the field of the human heart and relationships. The fact that gay sex cannot result in children being conceived does not mean that a wish for children is not part of the tangled causality of gay desire – as, indeed, the serried ranks of potential gay adopters and gay couples seeking means of assisted conception would appear to testify.

One important distinction, however, is that for gay persons, it could be argued that this natural, human wish to be a parent cannot automatically be squared with a vocation to parenthood. Not natural parenthood resulting from an act of heterosexual intercourse, that is. Or can it?

As I argued in my post of 29 March, the creation of new human life from a 'natural' act of heterosexual intercourse does not of itself indicate that the parents had a vocation to be the child's parents in the sense in which this term is often understood. E.g. the sexual act could have been entirely a one-off episode, with neither of the parents having the remote intention either to marry or become the progenitors of a new life; or one or both of the parents could already be married to someone else. In other words, the mere fact of a child being born as a result of a natural (heterosexual) sex act does not prove that it was right for the child to be conceived at all, according to the Church's moral law.

A contrary case could be the not uncommon situation whereby persons who are on balance probably more gay than straight enter into a marriage, partly because they want to try to be straight (sometimes out of religious conviction on top of the psychological motivation), and partly also to satisfy their 'natural' urge to become parents. Then, after a period of time, and perhaps not until the children have grown up, the 'gay' partner can no longer maintain the suppression or denial of their homosexuality, and comes out – often, but not in fact always, resulting in the destruction of the marriage. (Noted example, the gay Anglican Bishop of New Hampshire.) Can one assert with absolute confidence that the original motivation was so defective that the marriage should be annulled? However, if you do not think this should happen, this could be an instance of a gay person actually having had and responded to a vocation to be a natural parent: a biological parent, whose parenthood results from natural 'straight' sex.

OK, you could argue that, at the time when the sexual acts in question took place, the 'gay' spouse either felt or believed themselves to be straight; or at the very least, they loved their spouse and wanted to be a good wife or husband, and a good mother or father. But that's really making a judgement about a person's true inner motivation and feelings that no human being is in a position to make. What if, in reality, that person knew that what they were doing was fake but still wanted it out of compassion for their spouse and a genuine, natural longing to be a parent? Does that mean their vocation to marriage and parenthood was also a sham?

From the above two examples, I would conclude that neither the presence of 'natural' heterosexual desire within the sex act resulting in conception nor its absence necessarily validates or invalidates the proposition that the persons involved had a vocation to produce that child – when one looks at the issue of vocation in a traditional, legalistic way. But it is possible and necessary to look at it another way: that the vocation is demonstrated by the very existence of the child, called into being by God as the child of both parents – necessarily requiring them both to be involved as part of its very being. The vocation is, in this perspective, entirely separate from any consideration about the morality or appropriateness of the human situation that gave rise to the conception. And, indeed, one must remember that, according to the traditional teaching, all human flesh is born to some degree out of sin; all origination is bound up with original sin. It is not the motivation to become a parent that demonstrates the presence of a vocation to do so; rather, it is the fact of being a biological parent that represents the giving of the calling to become a true parent: the vocation to bring a child to life in the Spirit as well as in the flesh.

It is clear that many straight biological parents fail to respond to this true parental vocation by not living up to their responsibility to care for their offspring or by abandoning their children altogether, whether as a result of their own personal problems or out of callous indifference. Equally, it should be clear that gay biological parents are sometimes better than straight ones at being true parents: emotional and spiritual nurturers and carers of their children. Just as the circumstances in which the child was conceived has no intrinsic bearing on the vocation of the parents to become true parents (the vocation being their duty of obedience to God's will for them in this regard), neither does their sexual orientation.

Can one apply these same principles to the issue of adoption? Without repeating all my arguments about the potential suitability of gay persons – whether single or in a relationship – to become adoptive parents (see my post of 21 March), it would be consistent with this view of vocation to say that the mere fact of a person or a couple being straight or gay does not make them intrinsically more or less worthy of receiving and responding to a vocation to become an adoptive parent, if one defines an adoptive parent as someone who takes on the vocation to be a true spiritual parent to a child which that child's biological parents have not been able to fulfil.

There is, however, a crucial difference: whereas in the case of biological parenthood, the suitability of the individuals to become parents and the morality of the situation in which they did so have no bearing on their receiving a parental vocation, in situations of adoption, it is of course incumbent on adoption agencies to find parents who will be able to fulfil that vocation, which the child's natural parents failed to do. And in this respect, criteria such as whether the adopters are 'suitable parents' and the extent to which their lifestyles are moral or not, come into play. Clearly, for the Church, a sexually active gay couple is automatically deemed to be unsuitable to adopt children, as their lifestyle is considered to be gravely immoral. There seems no way out of this closed circle. All the same, if gay persons in fact can be good biological parents – in the ordinary sense of the term 'good parent': loving and devoted to their children's best interests – it seems logically inconsistent, at least, to state that no gay person or couple could ever be suitable candidates to adopt a child: incapable of living out a vocation for parenthood.

This is not in fact – at least, not in principle – the position of the Church, which in theory recognises that single gay persons (but not, contradictorily (?), celibate gay couples) can make excellent adoptive parents. But in practice, the Church appears to have excluded any possibility of working within the terms of the new UK legislation, for instance by submitting prospective gay adopters to a rigorous process of examination and scrutiny as to their ability to give particular children on an agency's books the love and security they need.

Are we to conclude from this that it's the Church's view that it is better for children to be placed with stable straight couples – even if they're not Christian, and even if they're not married – than with stable, gay Christian couples, even if they're celibate? What's the logic behind that, if that really is what's implied by the Church's stance? That a loving sexual union between a man and woman, even outside of formal Christian matrimony, presents a more authentic image to the child of the pattern of true Christian living than the love of two Christian persons of the same sex for each other and for the child? And it does not even appear necessary for gay sexual activity to be present for the latter type of relationship to be considered un-Christian. This is because the Church appears to make no real qualitative distinction between celibate and sexually active gay couples in this context, as both are ruled out in relation to adoption. Indeed, even a celibate 'union' between two gay persons can involve an exclusive, mutually self-giving commitment on the part of two individuals that can resemble a marriage in all but name and could be wrongly (in the eyes of the Church) accepted by the child as morally equivalent to a marriage.

Ultimately, then, it comes down to this: the Church is defending not the sanctity of marriage, but marriage as the sign and symbol of the naturalness of heterosexuality as the wellspring of family and parenthood. But whether one is heterosexual or not has no intrinsic bearing on whether God choses one as a parent. Gay or straight, promiscuous or faithful, all parents are answerable to God for the way they respond to his choice of them. The Church, on the other hand, choses not to chose gay persons for the role of parent; and in this, she, too, is fulfilling the responsibility to defend the truth and obey the divine commandment as she has received it. But gay persons will continue to be chosen by God for a vocation as parents, whether biological or adoptive. In the latter case, this choice will be made through the medium of adoption agencies but, regrettably, no longer Catholic ones, it seems. But it is to be hoped that the couples and children involved will not be left as orphans: bereft of the support and prayers of Mother Church. For if the Church is not the only agency that can open up the grace of adoption for gay couples and their children, it still holds the keys to the door.

Car Culture: Time For a Change? (Part Four)

2007-08-10T10:22:00.000Z

Possibly the most significant impact the car has had on the human environment is its contribution to the erosion of communities. There was some radio poll earlier this week, when people were asked to vote for their choice of the greatest contemporary social problem - or some such. I won't bore you with my Top Ten; but my number one is definitely the break down of community. Of course, a topic like this is itself somewhat question-begging. What do you mean by 'community'? Are you in danger of sentimentalising the value of community per se or the qualities of specific communities in the past? Would you really want to live in a close-knit community where everyone knows each other's business - having grown used to the privacy and self-reliance of modern living?

There undoubtedly is an element of viewing things through rose-tinted spectacles when we talk nostalgically about the loss of community. However, the absence of community throughout much of modern Britain, and the sense that it is something that we've lost, is undeniable. But how much of this is really attributable to the car? The decline in communities is usually ascribed to more general socio-cultural trends such as greater social 'mobility'; technology reducing our dependence on other people; increased materialism and individualism; women's access to work and careers diminishing the time and energy they have to devote to community building, which was largely driven by women in the past; the collapse of traditional social structures that gave people a sense of their place within a community, such as marriage, class and the church; and the increased levels of crime and delinquency, making people feel unsafe and forcing them to retreat into their own homes.

All of these are of course contributory factors, although some of them are arguably more by-products of community break down rather than causes. The car is another such contributory factor: it is, to coin a metaphor, an accelerator of all of the above trends. It's possible to think of ways in which the rise of universal car ownership has facilitated each of these social changes. For 'social mobility' substitute mobility in general: the way in which - in part thanks to the car - people are no longer tied to a particular locality (viz community) to be the centre of their personal or work life. Similarly, because of automotive technology, we are no longer dependent on public (local community-provided) transport, or on assistance in moving ourselves and our possessions provided by neighbours or local acquaintances. Women's access to careers, too, has been greatly advanced by their access to cars, meaning they have far more choice about the jobs they do; their work becomes personal and aspirational, rather than being involved in the provision of basic services to a local community, which was often the only work available to women.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I used to think it was ridiculous and - when I learnt the meaning of the term - decadent for households to own more than one car. This was based on the model that father either used the car for work, in which case mother didn't need a car (because she either didn't have a job at all or, if she did, this was more locally based); or else, father used public transport to get to work and mother than had the use of the car (which was my childhood situation). Nowadays, of course, it's common to see houses with at least two, sometimes as many as four or five, cars in the front drive and in what used to be called the front garden: at least one for each of the master and mistress of the household, along with cars for each of the grown-up children as they stay on in the parental home increasingly longer. And indeed, it would be hard for the families involved to envisage how they could manage without their cars if they all have 'no alternative' other than to travel out to work and to use the car for social life - neither of which are centred around their local area. For myself, I grumble about having to provide an unpaid taxi service to my non-driving partner. But I wonder what the effect on our relationship would be if she did pass a driving test and acquire a car. Would we miss the time we spend together in the car and the opportunity it provides to talk about things? Would our lives diverge even more if, instead of using only one car to go about our chores and our pleasures (the more sociable and greener option), we started using two? Individual cars lead to separate lives and careers, which in turn so often lead to separation.

I'm not trying to imply that women shouldn't enjoy the independence and freedoms which the car has played its part in bringing about. The car has undoubtedly brought tremendous social benefits - but, as I've said before, there has also been a social cost. One of the biggest of these, related to the whole community question, is the restriction of our children's freedom to roam and play outdoors. The two main reasons why parents are so afraid to let their children go out on their own nowadays are both directly car-related: 1) they could get run over; 2) they could be abducted (most easily by someone driving a car or van who can whisk them away in a flash).

The first of these concerns relates to the fact that we have still not adapted to the lethal potential of the car, in ways that I've discussed in previous instalments of this blog series. This is ultimately a case of our tolerating a certain quotient of child fatalities because of our personal and economic dependence on the car. But if we really wanted to put a stop to these accidents and reduce at least this aspect of our fear for our children, then only radical measures would do, such as banning cars and commercial vehicles altogether from driving through residential areas in hours when children are about, and imposing strict speed restrictions backed up by draconian penalties for violations - and even more so for any accidents involving children that still occurred. Is this a social cost we'd be prepared to pay to protect our children and let them play outdoors; or is endangering children's lives the cost we're willing to pay for the convenience of driving around wherever and whenever we want? And it's not just a case of reducing the number of road deaths but of a massive quality-of-life improvement that could result: for our kids who could suddenly reclaim the great outdoors; for parents who would no longer need to live in fear; and for all the 'community' who could enjoy the reduction in noise and pollution, and even start to enjoy walking around their own streets and getting to know their neighbours.

But what of the other concern of parents: that their kids could be abducted or 'befriended' by a paedophile who would then abuse them? Wouldn't children be more vulnerable not less to the unwelcome attention of local paedophiles if they were all out playing in the streets? Yes, if you're just looking at this with today's context in mind: the lack of a community that is watching out for the kids and is even out and about in the streets in question; cars that can just come along at any time when kids might be about; people, including those on the sex offenders list, living as strangers from one another and not known to the parents and others in the community who are concerned for the children's safety. If neighbourhoods are transformed into communities where people know each other and take on shared responsibility for keeping an eye on the children, and can be trusted because they're known to each other; and if, above all, the car is kept out (vital for communities to feel safe in their environment, to enjoy it, and look after it and each other) - then maybe parents would feel more confident that their children would be safe outdoors. Because they'd feel they owned and were in control of the world beyond the front door. Because this was a human world, a community, as it was when they were children and were safe to roam.

More on the car and the community in the next instalment of this blog series.

Car Culture: Time For a Change? (Part Three)

2007-08-03T21:16:00.001Z

Here I am, then, sitting in the cafeteria of the hospital of a town about 30 miles away from Cambridge, having once again discharged my taxi-driving duties to bring my partner over here. The A-road connecting the two towns has recently had a substantial upgrade, and most of the journey is along fresh-surfaced dual carriageways. While the convenience of a quicker and easier trip is greatly appreciated, the road now has the soulless, dehumanised character of many of today's routes, which bypass the towns and villages through which once they passed. We build our highways from scratch 'in the middle of nowhere', as the saying goes, with the deliberate intention that they should not pass directly by and through human habitations and settlements.

This has involved a total transformation of one of the main purposes of roads. In the past, roads were designed for 'connecting people', to adapt a well-known corporate tag line. That is, they went directly to where people lived; they were for journeys by people to people – lifelines connecting people to each other and the outside world. And they operated at a human level: your journey not only took you to specific people, but you could and would have encounters along the way with people you hadn't intended to meet: other travellers, with whom you could exchange greetings because you were proceeding at a pace that allowed such pleasantries; or just people living and working by the wayside. And there were roadside inns, farms and villages where one's basic needs could be met and further human contact could be had.

Nowadays, along our soulless dual carriageways, chance encounters are often of the unwelcome kind: when your car breaks down, suddenly exposing you to a sense of vulnerability as an individual who find yourself alone in remote surroundings without the friendly assistance of strangers; or with strangers who appear willing to assist but whose motives you can't trust. Or when suddenly, you get stuck in a traffic jam that seems to extend further than the eye can see, caused by further road development or maintenance ahead, or yet another accident. However, in such circumstances, there is always the mobile phone to connect you back to civilisation: to summon break-down assistance, or to alert family or business colleagues that you have been unavoidably held up.

The mobile phone provides one of the main supporting infrastructures for roads that are built in the 'middle of nowhere': it enables a tenuous link to be maintained between the remote, impersonal road environment and the human environments that are the points of departure and arrival. This, plus the additional array of in-car entertainments and navigational aids with which we surround ourselves, allows us to fool ourselves that we are still in a human environment: that there is a kind of seamless connectivity between A and B that accompanies us on our way. The reality is that we have become disconnected from the physical environment through which we move, and that this is no longer a place that has a comfortable human face for us. So we hasten to pass through it as quickly as possible. Our car is a little bubble of civilisation: its synthetic, technological smells and air-conditioned atmosphere a welcome means for us to forget the carbon emissions we pour out into the sweet fresh air of nature; the radio or CD player a lullaby that makes us unconscious of the engine's roar.

Yet, the irony of the mobile phone – or what were originally called 'car phones' until their use got generalised across all our activities – is that, while it perfectly fulfils this purpose of keeping us connected to our activities and human contacts during the temporary suspension of our involvement with them as we pass through an alien landscape, it has not yet adapted itself to the real human situation of driving. It is dangerous to use the mobile, precisely, while we are mobile – at least in what might be described as the archetypal context for its use: the individual driver maintaining a connection with points A and B as (s)he drives between them. Just how dangerous is of course demonstrated by the terrible lethal accidents of which mobile-phone use while driving is still one of the main causes – such as the killing of that 64-year-old granny by a 19-year-old 'texter-driver' referred to in the previous post in this series. And yet, the very utility of the mobile phone for drivers as they are driving – delivery men keeping in contact with the logistics office; husband and father phoning to say he's on his way after being detained at that meeting; friends organising their evenings while travelling to meet up – is the very reason why the law proscribing mobile-phone use while driving is so regularly flouted. And why the mobile-phone companies have made damn sure they provide optimal connectivity alongside motorways and other major trunk routes.

I pointed to these paradoxes when I made a layperson's contribution to the public consultation on the proposed law banning mobile-phone use by drivers a few years ago: that the technology and infrastructure as it has been established and made readily available creates a reasonable expectation on the part of ordinary drivers that they should be allowed to use their mobile phones while actually on the move; and that there might be some mitigating circumstances where using one's phone could in fact be safer and more socially responsible than not – so long as it was genuinely safe to use the phone in the specific driving situation. These circumstances included things like arranging for someone to pick up the children from school if one had been badly delayed by the traffic; or a 'life and death' situation, where a woman, for instance, might feel she needed to call the police because she was afraid she was being followed by a potential aggressor and obviously, therefore, didn't wish to stop.

And this is one of the major problems: because our roads pass through the 'middle of nowhere' – and because they enable us to travel in a little cocoon of civilisation through areas we would never dream of visiting on foot, particularly at night – there are many roads where there just aren't enough safe places to stop. This is another way, as with the mobile, in which the support infrastructure and physical circumstances of driving are not adapted to real human needs and limitations. It always strikes me as absurd when you pass electronic signs on the motorway – messengers of some vague motorway-surveillance authority; but are there actually any people on the job sending and updating those messages? – reminding you that 'tiredness kills' and urging you to take a break; often when you are miles away from any service station, or even – on some A-roads – when most of the service stations are closed. Someone on high has recognised that the expectations that have been built into our road-transport system – that people should be able to undertake their journeys, contrary to the traditional pattern of human life and work, at any time of the day or week (24/7) – might just be a tad out of sync with the way our human minds and bodies work. We need to take a break, but we've built our roads in a way that deliberately and literally by-passes normal human life – facilitators of seamless transition from point to point but without any intrinsic human value or reality. So we then haven't created places along the way – such as the inns, farms and villages of old – where people can safely satisfy their basic needs and renew contact with their own and others' humanity.

Our journeys, then, have been transformed from intrinsically human events to a somewhat tedious process of transition between points A and B, where the space in between has no fundamental value or relevance for us. And the car is what has enabled this to take place. So what?, you might say: the benefits outweigh the costs. Well, I suppose that is the heart of the matter: what you think the real costs and benefits are, and how they balance out. There's no doubt that the environmental costs have been monumental and continue to get worse. How much of the world's carbon emissions are accounted for by the internal combustion engine? I don't know what the latest estimates are but I'm sure it must be much, much more than the 3% attributed to air travel that everyone seems conveniently to get so het up about. And the carbon cost is just one of the many environmental impacts that our thrall to the car has brought about.

But more so even than the direct consequences of car culture on the environment, it is the impact on the culture in general that needs to be re-examined – particularly, the way the car has contributed massively to the break down of communities, and our alienation from the physical and human world around us. The next entry will return to a discussion of these matters.

Civil Partnerships Are the Best Way To Protect the Rights Of Unmarried Couples

2007-07-31T08:40:00.001Z

The proposals on new measures to protect the legal rights of co-habiting couples, published today by the Law Commission, constitute a valuable, well thought-out contribution to the debate on the rights, responsibilities, legal status and social provisions relating to couples, whether married or not.

However, the proposals stop short of recommending any formal legal status for co-habiting couples, such as a registered or civil partnership - for straight couples as well as gay. The primary justification for not making such a recommendation appears to be that this would be viewed by some organisations, such as the Church, as undermining the marriage institution; and that this might undermine support for the new regulations the Law Commission is recommending.

An alternative view, set out in my blog entry on civil partnerships of 10 July and in a supporting article on new principles for marriage, is that civil partnerships are necessary and desirable for a number of reasons. The proposals made by the Law Commission today are complementary to my own proposals on civil partnerships. Indeed, the Law Commission's recommendations provide a useful regulatory framework for the resolution of financial issues resulting from the break up of a partnership, which was an issue for which I did not make any specific proposals (see items 3 and 4 in the table of differences in the provisions for separating married and unmarried couples in the 10 July post).

The Law Commission's proposals essentially give co-habiting couples the right to opt out of the regulations assuring an equitable resolution of financial and property claims resulting from a separation. The existence of formal (straight as well as gay) civil partnerships would effectively provide the opportunity for couples to opt in to a similar but more extensive set of regulations, whether or not they would otherwise have been eligible to apply for the support envisaged by the Law Commission for couples who have not opted out from it.

This might appear to be merely a technical distinction. However, it relates to more fundamental questions about why civil partnerships for straight couples may still be required even if satisfactory regulations - such as those suggested by the Law Commission - are brought in to protect the rights of separating co-habiting couples and their dependents. These reasons are set out below:

1) Civil partnerships such as those I recommend would not undermine marriage because they would be part of a more comprehensive, 360-degrees reform of the legislation and regulations governing marriage and partnerships. These would be designed to greatly strengthen marriage, and ensure that the commitments made by marrying persons are more far-reaching, strict and enforceable in law. A registered / civil partnership, in this context, would be similar to current civil marriage in terms of the degree and scope of commitment that was being made - less than the full commitment of a marriage, which would be greater than that which is formally prescribed for civil marriage in the present.

2) The full set of proposals I make involve the legalisation of marriage for gay couples, which would involve exactly the same set of rights and responsibilities as those applying to straight couples. Religious marriage would be preserved as a heterosexual-only institution - unless the Church or other religious body decided otherwise. But the civil law regulating marriages consecrated in a formal religious context would be the same as that which applied to marriages - gay or straight - formalised in a civil ceremony.

If gay marriage were introduced, there would be a need to consider whether the existing regulations governing (gay) civil partnerships should be retained or modified. Having created the legal entity of civil partnerships, it could be considered unjust to expect gay civil partners to be legally obliged to 'upgrade' their status to that of married partners if they did not choose to do so - especially if marriage implied a stricter set of rights and responsibilities than do civil partnerships and marriages today. However, if gay persons were allowed to remain civil partners even if gay marriage were legalised, it would seem discriminatory to deny the same set of options to straight couples: marriage, civil partnership or co-habitation (governed by regulations such as those recommended by the Law Commission).

Clearly, gay marriage is not immediately on the agenda, and the Law Commission's proposals do at least represent a sensible option for improving the protection afforded to co-habiting couples that currently choose not to marry. However, in my view at least, it is inevitable that gay marriage will eventually be introduced. This is because, in a civil context, it is discriminatory that gay persons cannot marry but straight persons can. People of a conventional religious conviction are entitled to hold the belief that gay marriage is an invalid concept. But then equally, if gay marriage were legalised, religious institutions would still be under no obligation to accept them as valid - just as, for instance, the Catholic Church does not accept that a civil marriage entered into by a Catholic without the consent of the Church is valid; or the Church of England does not necessarily accept the validity of second marriages. The fact that the Church holds a particular opinion about gay marriage should not prevent secular society from reforming the civil marriage institution so that it is not discriminatory.

However, even if gay marriage is never legalised, there is still an argument to be made that denying civil partnerships to straight couples is discriminatory under current legislation. This is for two related reasons: a) it involves denying to straight couples the rights and responsibilities bestowed on gay civil partners; b) as part of this, straight couples are denied the possibility to opt in to a particular set of regulations (those applying to civil partnerships), which is not denied to gay couples.

Any set of regulations designed to protect the rights of co-habiting / unmarried couples must surely apply equally to straight and gay couples, including the measures being proposed by the Law Commission. So if co-habiting couples - gay or straight - are allowed to opt out of the minimal set of supportive legal regulations advocated by the Law Commission, they should also be allowed to opt in to the more maximal set of regulations involved in civil partnerships.

But ultimately, only the legalisation of gay civil marriage will enable full equality and a balanced set of regulations, in which gay and straight couples will be allowed the same set of options: marriage, civil partnership and legally protected co-habitation.

Car Culture: Time For a Change? (Part Two)

2007-07-21T12:58:00.000Z

It was an accident, by the way: the cause of the sudden increase in traffic volume I noticed while writing the last blog entry. In fact, it was on the very road I was talking about – where I'd enjoyed that surprisingly revealing if noisy and smoky walk – probably at the rather dangerous junction where I regularly turn off to go down to my village.

There've been fatal accidents there and at other points on the road nearby before. Indeed, it seems part of the experience of modern driving that if you regularly travel along the same stretch of road – particularly out of town – you become very familiar with the accident black spots, even to the extent of having personal recollections of when such and such an accident took place, usually because it held you up on a journey. These recollections are often prompted by the roadside shrines to accident victims that have become a familiar part of the landscape. One route out from Cambridge I frequently drive along is peppered with such memorials – for one of which I indeed remember seeing the wrecked car being attended by the emergency services – and more and more seem to crop up all the time.

And yet we accept such daily horrors, probably precisely because they are an inevitable by-product of driving, at least with the technology, infrastructure and cultural attitudes that characterise this activity in the present. Driving is an inherently dangerous, potentially lethal activity. Yet we blind ourselves to this fact, possibly because this is the only way we can pluck up the courage to actually get behind the steering wheel. You could call this a benevolent form of blindness – so long as we still bear in mind that we need to be safety-conscious – in that it enables us to perform a useful function for society and ourselves.

But there is another form of blindness to the risks of driving, which consists of the absence of any proper sense of danger at all. At the risk of generalisation, I would say that this is typical of many men, who seem to go through life altogether without believing in the dangers associated with some of their activities. It's this same attitude that leads some men to find the idea of war – at least, in anticipation – exciting rather than terrifying, as if they don't really believe they could be killed. This lack of a sense of danger is typical, too, of another type of driver: the young, particularly the male of the species, who very often also seem to have no concept of their own mortality (bless them). But then it is precisely this sort of driver who is likely to drive most recklessly, not just for the negative reason that they don't believe they'll have an accident (though that helps) but for the 'positive' reason that they're enamoured with the excitement of driving as fast as they can and the thrill of the chase. Allowing kids like this to drive without any form of restraining supervision or technology (such as an accompanying adult or automatic speed limiters) is like putting a loaded gun in the hands of a child, taking off the safety catch and then telling them not to pull the trigger.

It may sound outlandish and reactionary to suggest that tough restrictions should be placed on young persons' freedom to drive, at least that of newly qualified drivers. But then you read news stories such as one that appeared today about a 19-year-old girl who's been sentenced to four years' detention because she crashed into a car while texting on her mobile phone, killing the other driver: a 64-year-old grandmother. She clearly didn't realise how dangerous it is to take one's attention away from driving even for an instant; so perhaps she really wasn't fit to drive.

The leniency of the sentence has been criticised. Far better to have tougher preventive measures in the first place and thereby reduce the number of accidents of this sort. But let's consider the sentence. Along with the majority of people in this country, you could be forgiven for thinking, I'm in favour of a radical overhaul of sentencing for criminal offences. What kind of punishment fits this girl's crime, if such a question makes any sense? I would like to see sentencing be a factor of two main objectives: 1) to make the perpetrator of the crime fully aware of the gravity of what they've done, so as to encourage remorse and a true resolution never to repeat the same mistake; and 2) to satisfy the demands for justice for the victims. On the second criterion, you could say that a proportionate punishment might have been a term of imprisonment so long (e.g. 25 years plus) that the girl in question could never have a family of her own, given that her action has deprived a family of its mother and grandmother. But on the first objective, the term that has been imposed will probably be sufficient to make the driver feel truly remorseful about what she did and determined never to do it again. So perhaps something in between would be appropriate: maybe a sufficiently long time to make the offender have serious concerns about whether she could ever have a family of her own, without necessarily destroying that possibility altogether – enough to take away the so-called best years of her life. Certainly, it would be worth considering a life-time ban from driving, rather than the five years that was imposed.

Sad, though, that one should have to talk in such terms and that two families have been devastated (that of the victim and that of the offender), as one of the police officers involved in the case put it. And this is just an illustration of how awful the human effect of motoring accidents caused not even necessarily by recklessness, but by carelessness or inattention, can be. Perhaps we really do need to give serious consideration to changing the way we assess people's suitability to drive and the punishments we mete out for driving errors to reflect a greater moral consciousness of the gravity of such incidents.

Sometimes it surprises me that there aren't many more accidents than there already are. In a way, driving is a quite bizarre phenomenon: we devolve the responsibility to provide mass transportation to individual amateurs, who are expected to be able to operate potentially lethal equipment (cars) and be capable of making intelligent, informed, split-second life-and-death decisions with a relative absence of training to a truly professional standard such as that which is expected of pilots, train drivers or even coach drivers. Put millions of such drivers onto the overcrowded, low-tech road infrastructure of this country that is supposed to support them, and it is inevitable there will be lots of crashes. Perhaps it's time to up the competency level and reduce the number of drivers.

Car Culture: Time For a Change?

2007-07-19T10:56:00.001Z

The local press here in Cambridge, along with local people – to judge from the press's reported swelling mailbag – has been up in arms this week about plans to introduce a limited version of London's Congestion Charge. People would be charged for any driving they did within the bounds of the city – admittedly, only a relatively small area – during the morning rush hour between 7.30 and 9.30. Too bad for all those urban tractor-driving school-run mums, if they exist in Cambridge – Cambridge is probably more aptly described as the land of the sensible, environmentally-friendly super-mini second family car. They'd be charged the same fee as the lolloping 4x4s in any case – possibly, an incentive to get one: it would certainly encourage more car sharing; or would it?

We're so used to the madness of modern driving and the hopelessly inadequate measures to control it that we've become immune to it. Driving really isn't a sensible modern means of mass transportation in many circumstances any more. But we're wedded to the ideal of car ownership and driving because of the ideal of personal liberty with which it is bound up in our minds, along with the whole culture and romance of driving, associated with power, the thrill of speed, technology, wealth and social status. I used to enjoy driving for some of those very reasons, but it's increasingly become a stressful chore and more often an impingement rather than an enhancement of my liberty, as I literally spend hours taxi-ing my non-driving, mildly disabled partner around between appointments and 'essential' shop visits, thereby greatly taking advantage of the benefit of ' flexible' working hours that my work as a freelance writer and researcher supposedly affords me.

Clearly, there are some activities and situations where driving is the most convenient, even necessary, mode of transport, e.g. carting kids around on their hectic and random timetable of social, scholastic and leisure engagements; transporting infirm or disabled persons; emergencies; and those 'essential' out-of-town-centre superstore visits – but is that really the best and most enjoyable way to bring in the provisions? But equally, there are possibly more situations where the alternatives to driving either are already or could be both more practical and enjoyable, not just from the green perspective but from that of quality of life.

For me, it sometimes requires a situation where I have to walk, rather than hop into the car, to appreciate how much I'm missing through all the driving. I recently took a 2½ mile walk from one village, where my car was being serviced, back to the village I live in and was struck by the landscape I was walking through in quite a dramatic, unexpected way. My whole perspective on the physical environment was shifted; there were so many things I hadn't noticed and so much hidden beauty along this stretch of road I'd covered in the car a thousand times before. It was really a kind of epiphany, and I thought to myself that if my circumstances changed, I would drastically cut down my car usage – maybe even get rid of it altogether. That could be quite liberating!

My experience during what our non-car-owning forefathers would have considered to be a very short walk brought home to me just how much not only our physical environment but also our ability to connect with it has been degraded by the car. The road I was walking on for half of the journey was a major A-road, albeit one-lane; and on the face of it, it really wasn't a pleasant environment to be walking through. An endless string of large lorries, vans and cars came thundering past, literally shaking the ground and stirring my hair with the wind drag. Some of the drivers appeared surprised and even suspicious to see a pedestrian of what I like to call 'smart-shabby' appearance walking in their direction, even though there was a footpath. And really, it was not a road you would normally have chosen to walk along because of all the noise and pollution; indeed, I don't think I ever had walked along there throughout the 11 years I'd been living in one of the villages it connected to the outside world, although I'd cycled along it back in 1997! And yet, as I say, there was so much to see and enjoy.

It's difficult to envisage how we can ever become 'environmentally sensitive' in our automotive usage and technology, and in our technology per se, unless we become truly sensitive to the environment: aware of our surroundings, emotionally attached to them, and concerned about what happens to the physical fabric of the places where we live. But the car, even the more eco-friendly variety, tends mostly to militate against such an engagement with the environment. The places the car allows us to access become both symbolically, and on occasions literally, no man's lands: places we pass through, at speed, on the way to our destination; not an intrinsically valuable, indeed priceless, reality that can enrich and interact with our senses and emotions at every step – nor, indeed, a landscape filled with human activity and life of which we are and feel a part (rather than from which we are apart).

As I write this, I've become struck by a sudden increase in road traffic passing through the village high street on which I live. There must have been an accident or some other hold up on one or other of the local arterial routes. It's usually the A14, which has one of the densest vehicle-per-hour ratios and highest accident rates in the country. Whenever there is an accident – often fatal – the whole road system for miles around can get grid-locked. I remember one occasion when it took over four hours to make the five-mile journey back home, when the A14 and surrounding routes got paralysed by a sudden heavy snowfall to which the gritters did not react in time. Some poor folk were stranded in their frozen vehicles for 24 hours.

There's much that could be said about the madness of that. But I wanted to make a couple of observations about my road. The reason why I noticed the sudden increase in traffic is that normally, outside peak hours such as rush hour, lunch time or school pick-up time, the road outside is generally quite quiet – apart from, ironically, six o'clock in the morning when the postal truck unloads its cargo at the village sorting office next door! (But then, given my 'flexible' working hours, I'm normally up at that time anyway trying to catch up on time lost on taxi duty the day before!) But then occasionally, some driver (and not just the boy racer type) sees fit to let rip on the accelerator as soon as he turns on to the road and storms along at 50 mph+. This turns me instantly into 'indignant from Cambridge', as it just seems so needlessly reckless and dangerous, especially as it is a residential road with a school on it.

Mostly, this behaviour happens in the evening, when there are few pedestrians, let alone children, about. But that's not really the point: with the freedom that car ownership brings should come the responsibility of driving safely; or at least as safely as possible and practical, given the fact that driving is inherently a life-threatening activity, as the rate of accidents on the A14 – many of which are not due to driver error – testifies.

And that brings me to the question of what is the acceptable level of risk, injury and fatalities that society should be prepared to accept from widespread car ownership and usage? And that is a question I will consider in the next instalment of this blog.

New Principles For Marriages and Partnerships (Part Two)

2007-07-10T11:32:00.000Z

2 Civil partnerships (gay and straight)

If civil marriages were redefined and reformed in the manner outlined in part one of this essay, then there would be a corresponding need to revise the thinking and legislation regarding civil partnerships. This would be the case for a number of reasons:

As marriages, under my proposed set up, would be more strict in terms of the legal and social obligations placed upon them, this could leave a vacuum, whereby the looser commitments many people make today when getting married would no longer have any formal framework within which they could be expressed.
As my proposals involve extending civil marriage to gay persons, it would be necessary to at least redefine the current rules relating to gay civil partnerships. If civil partnerships were retained, with or without a modification to the rules governing them, then it would be illogical if not discriminatory to limit them to gay couples.
Many people have already argued in favour of some form of official recognition of extra-marital straight relationships as a means of protecting the legal rights of those involved, and providing some means to celebrate and recognise those relationships that does not involve marriage. The current blog entry represents a proposal for precisely this sort of arrangement.

2.0 Guiding principles

2.0.1 Recognition of an existing status, not the start of a new one

Under my proposals, there would be a fundamental difference between a marriage (civil or religious) and a civil partnership. The beginning of a marriage would represent the start of a new condition of life: a new legal status pertaining to the relationship between spouses; formally becoming part of a new family; taking on rights and responsibilities towards the marriage partner and his / her extended family. A civil partnership, on the other hand, would be primarily the way in which society recognised the existence of a relationship outside of marriage, and conferred certain rights and responsibilities upon the individuals involved that were not identical to, or as extensive as, those of a marriage.

2.0.2 Table illustrating the differences and similarities, under my proposals, between marriages (gay and straight) and registered partnerships:

Marriages	Partnerships
1) While the actual sexual relationship is not inherently expected to be permanent and exclusive, there is an expectation of a life-long emotional and practical commitment to the spouse and his / her family	1) Neither the sexual relationship nor the emotional / practical commitment are inherently expected to be life-long. However, a registered partnership is still a serious social and moral statement of intent to care for one's partner and his / her dependants
2) A marriage is deemed to establish a permanent relationship between the spouses and their respective families: one doesn't just marry a husband or wife but marries into their whole family	2) A registered partnership is not deemed to establish extended family relationships other than those of genetic relatedness or those recognised by social convention. For instance, one's gay son's registered partner is not formally one's son-in-law, as his husband would be; but one is of course entitled to call him such. The establishment of a partnership would, however, confer the status of 'next of kin' on one's partner, unless this was explicitly rejected by mutual consent
3) There is a formal and enforceable process for dissolving marriages and for ensuring that the legal obligations of care for one's spouse, which one entered into on marrying them, continue to be fulfilled (albeit in a modified form) after the marriage	3) There is no formally prescribed process for dissolving registered partnerships, although best-practice recommendations are made about counselling and reconciliation services that are available. The process for determining the partners' financial and practical obligations towards one another and their dependants after the partnership has ended (which clearly would need to be worked out in much more detail than is presented here) is much more streamlined, with fewer possibilities for arbitration and appeal
4) The rights, needs and justifiable expectations of each spouse and of dependants, particularly children, are all given equal consideration in the event of a divorce. There is no inherent presumption of guilt for the marriage break down, and no automatic linkage of blame for this to the divorce settlement. This would be carried out purely on a basis of need, proportionality and justice – to be determined on the merits of each case	4) The rights, needs and justifiable expectations of all involved are also taken into consideration in the event of a partnership break up. However, there are fewer safeguards in place to ensure an equitable settlement: i.e. there is nothing such as a 'Statement of Expectations and Intentions' (a recommended formal document for before and after a marriage) or pro nuptial agreement to set the parameters, unless the partners informally agree to one. Similarly, the arbitration and settlement process is much more rudimentary: there is more of a straightforward equation, for instance, along the lines of 'father pays maintenance, inflation-linked, of £ x in exchange for y amount of access to the children whose custody is awarded to the mother'. There would also be fewer resources and tools made available for enforcing such decisions, meaning that abuses would inevitably arise
5) The tax and benefits system would be used to the advantage of married couples, especially those with children, in order to provide an extra incentive for married persons to stay together. The UK Conservative Party's proposals on marriage, published today (9 July), are compatible with this suggestion.	5) The assistance provided to registered partners and their families by the tax and benefits system would be awarded on a strict basis of needs, e.g. in line with the government's policies on reducing child poverty. There would not be any additional premium or separate benefits / tax breaks as there would be for married couples.

2.0.3 Prioritising marriage but dignifying partnerships

The purpose of the benefits and tax measures outlined in point No. 5 in the table above would not be to privilege marriage unfairly over unmarried, registered partnerships. They are merely intended as an additional incentive for people to take the decision to get married and to stay married, given the immense social benefit to be gained from stable marriages and families. On the contrary, by creating an additional official legal status for unmarried partnerships, it would be intended to support and affirm these relationships and the important role they play within society and families.

It is often argued that giving unmarried partnerships a status equivalent or similar to that of marriage would only serve to undermine the institution of marriage. My proposals address this criticism by greatly reinforcing marriage; by giving it a new and clearly defined status within society and families; and by establishing stricter, enforceable rights and responsibilities for married and divorced persons.

Precisely because of this more rigorous marriage regime, there would be many couples who might otherwise have got married who would no longer be willing or able to marry, for one reason or another: problems with emotional commitment generally; fear or rejection of the obligations entailed; reluctance to consider themselves part of their spouse's family; family objections; etc. The new 'registered partnership' framework provides an alternative official recognition of such relationships; and it also provides a framework of civic law to support pre-existing relationships of this sort that have hitherto given rise to de facto legal loopholes whereby parents have been able to evade their financial and moral responsibilities for children, for instance, or inheritance and tax rights have not been recognised.

Control Orders: A Better Alternative

2007-07-06T10:02:00.001Z

The trouble with Control Orders - the UK security measure whereby terror suspects against whom a conventional legal case cannot easily be built can effectively be placed under indefinite house arrest - is that in practice they embody a presumption of guilt. This is in contrast to the long-established British legal convention that a suspect is to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Yesterday, the government launched an appeal to the House of Lords against a legal ruling previously obtained by six Iraqi Control-Order detainees that their detention violated their rights to liberty and a fair trial.

As in all such cases, it is important to try to strike a balance between the legal and human rights of suspects, and the right of the public to be protected against potential murderers. But the de facto presumption of guilt is clear: if the police who press for a particular suspect to be controlled did not think that the evidence they had gathered strongly suggested the person in question was a terrorist, then there would be no point in the measures - other than the exercise of political coercion to try to intimidate radical groups and individuals into behaving in a more moderate manner. But while a sense of injustice persists about the way in which suspects’ guilt is accepted by the judges who ratify Control Orders, so the suspicion that these measures are just such a coercive political measure will linger, to the detriment of the so-called battle to win hearts and minds.

There is an alternative that would bring more fairness back into the legal process surrounding suspects of this sort. If indeed there is a presumption of guilt, why not formalise this and say that it is then down to the suspect to demonstrate his or her innocence through a fair, open judicial proceeding? The suspect would have the right to know on what basis their guilt was being presumed and could appoint a legal team to build a case in their defence. The issue could then be decided in an adversarial manner just like any other case (albeit that, for security purposes, this might not involve a jury). The difference from the assumption of innocence would be that if, on the balance of evidence, it was not conclusive whether the individual either was or was not a terrorist, the Control Order or other restrictive measure would remain in place - subject to fairly regular (e.g. six-monthly or annual) review. If the verdict was guilty, however, this would enable the suspect to be imprisoned, thus doing away with the anomalous legal no-man’s land of the current system. And obviously, a not-guilty verdict would allow the individuals affected to regain their rightful liberty.

Clearly, there are potential pitfalls behind this idea, and legal safeguards protecting both the rights of the individual and the prerogatives of the state would need to be put in place. The main issue would be whether society would be able to accept a derogation from the presumption of innocence and would be able to overcome concerns that this would lead to further erosion of this basic right. But under the present set up, the presumption of innocence is in fact not working either to protect the rights of suspects or the state’s duty of protection. It’s because the formal process of law demands that the accused be presumed innocent until proven guilty that the case against them can’t be taken to court and the suspects are left in a legal limbo. And because a democratic state can’t arbitrarily impose imprisonment without trial, it has had to come up with the Control Order compromise; but this is not secure, as recent evasions have demonstrated - so society is not being protected.

The limited admission of a formal presumption of guilt that I am advocating would recognise the realities of fighting terrorism, which are that absolute guilt is sometimes impossible to prove beyond all reasonable doubt and that therefore guilt is having to be presumed in certain cases. And, at the same time, this would allow suspects to be given a fair hearing and chance to exonerate themselves if indeed they are without blame. And this would also defuse the charge made in some quarters that Control Orders are politically motivated and are placing the legal system at the service of an oppressive, anti-Islamic state.

New Principles For Marriages and Partnerships

2007-06-18T08:20:00.000Z

In my blog of 17 December (‘Modern Sexual Morality’), I stated that in my view, it would be sensible if our society were to formulate some new ethical and legal principles governing civil marriages and partnerships, involving – among other things – a clearer separation between the thinking on these and Christian marriage (as well as religious marriage in general). I argued that the way we view civil marriages and extra-marital, committed partnerships continues to embody some of the moral standards and judgements associated with our Christian tradition, even though some of the types of relationship themselves could be deemed to be morally at fault on a more dogmatic interpretation of Christian teaching.

In general, the combination and interplay between Christian and liberal principles (what I term ‘Christo-liberalism’) create a great deal of ambiguity about sexual ethics. This contributes to undermining marriage and stable relationships, in that the permissiveness that society tolerates and even encourages in some areas comes into conflict with Christian-derived standards that are expected in other areas. This exacerbates the tendency for individuals in relationships to have different expectations about the degree and type of commitment that are involved; and, indeed, it makes the whole basis for commitment as such more difficult and unpredictable.

In my blog of 16 December (‘The Paradoxes Of Gay Marriage’), I argued in favour of a tripartite arrangement for marriages and formally recognised partnerships: religious marriage (heterosexual, according to the provisions of the faiths concerned); civil marriage (open to both straight and gay couples); and some sort of looser civil partnership arrangement recognising and affirming committed extra-marital partnerships (straight and gay). In the present blog, I will attempt to map out the shape that these two kinds of civil marriage / partnership could take once the inherited Christian moral demands and expectations are stripped away from them. This is not to undermine Christian marriage; quite the contrary. Both Christian and civil marriage could be strengthened if a more rigorous and consistent set of distinct standards and values relating to each could be clearly articulated and agreed, while family law were modified in accordance with those new principles.

1 Civil marriages (gay and straight)

Civil marriages already exist, of course: those carried out, in the UK, in a register office. They are not yet available for gay couples; although I would propose extending them (but not church and other religious marriage) to gays and lesbians.

Some key points in this proposed new ethics of civil marriage, which would then need to be reflected in legislation, are as follows:

1.0 Guiding principles

1.0.1 The relationship between the spouses is accepted as being potentially impermanent and non-exclusive

Under the prevailing mores of our society, civil marriages are in fact, if not in right, predicated on an assumption that they might not last and can be dissolved. The very existence of legal divorce means that a civil marriage, as a legal contract, is reversible. Christian Churches vary in the extent to which they accept divorce. So long as they are held to be valid, Catholic marriages are believed to be permanent: even if a couple obtains a civil divorce, the Church does not recognise it, and the individuals are not able to re-marry in a Catholic church. The Church of England also in principle does not permit re-marriage in church for the same reason (the definitive character of the original wedding vows); although it does recognise divorce and give church blessings to divorced individuals that are obliged to re-marry in a civil ceremony.

This was of course the reason why Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles were forced to get married in a register office. By an interesting quirk, there would have been no impediment to the royal couple getting married in church if the Prince had been Catholic (. . .). This is because Mr Parker-Bowles (a Catholic) had obtained an annulment for his marriage to Camilla, presumably on the basis that Camilla had not really meant her vows (including promises of life-long love and fidelity) when she made them. Annulments mean that the original marriage effectively never existed as a true sacramental union; so that Camilla was not divorced but single in the eyes of the Catholic Church, and so eligible for a marriage to a widower (Charles).

It is, on one level, entirely reasonable that the Church or any religion should demand of those of its followers who get married that they should promise to love each other and remain faithful to each other permanently and exclusively, and that this should be part of the core concept of marriage (and that in the absence of such a commitment – as in the case of Camilla Parker-Bowles – the marriage is invalid). But is it reasonable that the state should expect such a commitment from couples contracting a civil marriage? It is not part of the remit of the state to assert any kind of duty for one citizen to love another to the exclusion of any other sexual relationship, and to maintain that love indefinitely. In a way, it is almost a case of the state over-stepping its rightful areas of jurisdiction and competence that the civil marriage or partnership ceremony should involve declarations of life-long love and fidelity; apart from the fact that these promises could appear unrealistic from a psychological or spiritual point of view without some sort of appeal in faith to a higher authority than the state – although Christian marriages, according to the statistics, are just as prone to break up as civil unions. Hence, the promise of life-long love and fidelity is an example of what I mean by Christo-liberalism: the civil authorities and law effectively taking on one aspect of the Church's role and value system, and expecting a Christian-type commitment from a secular marriage.

Under my proposed new framework, marital infidelity (adultery) would no longer be a sufficient justification in itself for obtaining a divorce. This is because, built in to the concept and legislation for civil marriages, and perhaps even into the wording in the wedding ceremony, would be a realistic expectation that infidelities on both sides might well occur. In order for specific acts of adultery to be taken into consideration when deciding whether to authorise a divorce, they would have to be viewed in the context of the whole relationship; i.e. whether the relationship as a working partnership had broken down, and whether more harm (emotional, practical, financial, etc.) to all affected, including children and other dependants, would be done if the couple stayed together or separated. There would also be a more formal process for trying to achieve reconciliation between the spouses, which I will go into further below.

But if a civil marriage cannot reasonably demand life-long love and fidelity, what the state does have the right to expect from marrying individuals is a contractually binding, reciprocal duty of care on the part of the spouses for each other and for any dependants, particularly children and extended family members, e.g. elderly relatives. This leads to my second new principle for civil marriages:

1.0.2 Permanent, contractually binding duty on the part of the married individual to look after the needs of their spouses and other dependants, including if the relationship breaks down and the marriage is dissolved in a divorce

The idea behind this is that even if there is a realistic acceptance that feelings may change and the marital relationship may come to an end in emotional terms, the commitment to marry someone should involve accepting that one is taking on a permanent responsibility for their care. In a religious context (and in the current Christo-liberal version of civil marriages), this responsibility is viewed as a natural extension of the commitment to love one’s spouse for the rest of one’s life. In a de-Christianised civil marriage, the continuing nature of this duty of care becomes a matter of social justice. On marrying, spouses make promises to one another that involve decisions affecting the whole subsequent course of their lives (careers, relationship possibilities, etc.). In addition, the state provides incentives for people to get married and have children through the tax and benefits system. Divorce represents a considerable economic cost through the greater dependency of single parents on social services and benefits; through the poverty that it can bring about; and through the personal and social problems experienced by children that are affected by the break-up of their parents and continuing instability in their family lives.

Ensuring that, as much as possible, divorcing individuals are held to the commitment of ongoing care they made when they married is a means to compensate their spouses for the sacrifices they have made for the sake of the marriage and their partner; and it is a way to lessen the other social and economic costs. The increased legal obligation to provide financial support and exercise an ongoing duty of care towards spouses and dependants would be a function of an enhanced set of rights and responsibilities in marriage.

1.0.3 Re-definition of the meaning of the married state itself, and the rights and responsibilities that accompany it

1.0.3.1 On marrying, individuals would be deemed to have established a permanent relationship between themselves, their spouse and their spouse’s family: they become a member of the spouse’s family. After any divorce, they continue to be a member of their former spouse’s family: they can no more sever that tie than they could cease to be the parent of any of their children, or the aunt and uncle of nephews and nieces with whom their children are genetically related.

This is a formalisation of a principle that also applies to Christian marriage. But again, in the civil context, the purpose is not to imply some sort of ontological union between the husband and wife (who in Christian terms become ‘one flesh’, and hence one family) but to express the truth that families continue even when parents split up, and to encourage the relationships both in the nuclear and the extended family (e.g. between parents-in-law and children-in-law; or between uncles and aunts, and nephews and nieces) to be healed and to prosper, emotionally and materially. When couples marry, they effectively take on the roles and responsibilities previously exercised by their spouse’s parents towards their partners and towards other dependants in the family, including eventually the couple’s parents themselves as they need care in old age. This is the meaning of a father ‘giving away’ the daughter to his son-in-law in marriage: the husband takes on the role of care previously fulfilled by the father.

Formalising the principle that marriage makes the spouses permanent members of each other’s family – whether or not they have children who are then genetically related to the extended family – is a way to underscore the importance of the duties and promises towards the whole family that spouses make when getting married: they can no longer consider that they have a lesser duty towards relatives with whom they are not genetically related than towards those with whom they are.

It may seem unnecessary to encode family relatedness in law in this way. However, I would argue that this is not entirely arbitrary but corresponds to the deeper psychological and socio-anthropological significance of marriage: that an individual does not just marry another individual but marries into an entire family, towards which they then have social, moral and legal responsibilities. Enshrining these things in law would be a way of realigning modern Western social practice in the marriage area with these universal psychological and socio-anthropological meanings, which are more explicitly expressed in less secularised cultures and religions that still place a greater emphasis on the extended family, e.g. Hinduism and orthodox Judaism. Along with greater responsibilities, this also gives married persons greater rights as integral members of their spouse’s family.

It might well result from this proposed change to current social and legal practice that the family ties that a re-marrying person felt towards their second acquired family might be weakened if they continued to view their first acquired family as family. But then the provisions of the law (discussed further below) setting out both the continuing responsibilities towards the ‘divorced family’ and those towards the family of the second spouse are intended to reinforce realistic, responsible and caring attitudes and behaviour towards both families. In any case, the purpose of formally instituting the idea that marriage involves marrying into a whole family – for good – is not to weaken second marriages but to help ensure, wherever possible, that first marriages and their socially beneficial effects endure.

1.0.3.2 Spouses have a particular responsibility of care towards their children and stepchildren, along with a clear set of rights. Establishing the principle that, even after a divorce, an individual continues to be a member of their spouse’s family makes it even more difficult for divorced parents to ignore the needs of their children or any children of their spouse from a previous relationship or marriage with whom they have also established any sort of parental relationship. In contrast to the view set out above that spouses cannot be under the obligation to love each other permanently and exclusively, they should be considered to have at least a strong moral obligation to love their children; and a formal, legal obligation to provide for their children’s material needs, even if they are not able to provide for all their emotional needs.

The new law and practice of civil marriage would therefore include strict measures to ensure that absentee parents continued to look after their children’s and stepchildren’s financial and material needs. And at the same time, there would need to be a better way to ensure equal treatment in the assessment of which parent was best-placed to have the greater share of custody, and to enable regular and sufficient access to the children for the parent not awarded custody. In particular, there should be no bias in the determination of these things towards the party in the divorce viewed as being more ‘wronged’ in the marriage break up; and no assumption that mothers are ‘naturally’ more suited to being the main carers than fathers.

These two ideas (the mother as the wronged party and the more able carer) currently often go hand-in-hand and are part of the Christian inheritance that has been taken forward in modern secular (Christo-liberal) marriage. This leads to custody decisions often being made on the basis of reward and punishment in relation to a moral judgement that is taken about unfaithful husbands having violated the ‘sanctity’ of marriage and of motherhood; ideas which clearly derive from the Christian history of our country. These judgements should really be regarded as irrelevant within a fully secular marriage institution. In particular, assessments about custody and access should consider the children’s needs and wishes (emotional, social and economic) first and foremost, and then the rights of both parents to continue to play an active role in their children’s upbringing so long as this will not be detrimental to the children in any way.

1.0.3.3 The above two provisions apply equally to straight and gay couples. As civil marriage would now involve a clear social purpose (cementing strong extended families and fostering responsible personal relationships), and a strict set of rights and responsibilities, there is no reason in a secular context why these elements should not be extended to gay couples as well as straight partners. This is what would give gay marriage a real social and cultural meaning beyond a ‘mere’ celebration of the love and partnership of two individuals. So, under the new regime I am proposing, gay spouses would be considered in law to have become permanent members of each other’s families by marrying each other. For instance, if one’s gay son gets married, his husband becomes one’s son-in-law; and the son-in-law becomes an uncle to any of his husband’s nephews and nieces; etc. And, just as in straight marriage, these family relationships and the associated responsibilities towards extended family members would be considered to continue to be in effect even after any divorce.

The same goes for the duty of care and maintenance towards spouses and children: this should also be considered to remain in effect just as much for gay divorcees as for straight ones. With respect to children, gay married persons should have full equality in terms of assessments of their suitability to become parents: through adoption or equal access to assisted reproduction, e.g. through artificial insemination (for lesbians) or surrogacy (for gay men). If either of the spouses were already a parent before getting married, there should also be no discrimination in determining whether or not the newly married gay couple should have custody over them (if this were disputed with the other parent), or which of the spouses should have custody over any children in the event of a divorce: again, the needs and wishes of the children should be paramount.

Whether or not one regards the advent of the gay family, and the use of artificial means of conception to enable gay persons to become parents, as desirable or morally acceptable is largely irrelevant within the context of a fully secularised marriage institution. Again, these are considerations and judgements that derive from the Christian tradition. The main concerns from the civil perspective are fostering strong family ties and responsibilities; and ensuring the maximum degree of continuing, stable care for family members and children that either already exist or who will be born to gay parents – whether or not society decides to extend the framework of marriage to such gay relationships and families. If that framework is created, this offers the chance of giving those children greater support and rights as they progress through childhood. But this involves society shedding its remaining prejudices about gay people and gay sex: its association as something inherently dirty and immoral that does not have a place alongside and within family life. And if society really decides that gay people are deserving and capable of taking on the elevated set of obligations and privileges that should be associated with civil marriage, then it follows that they should be viewed as capable of taking on responsible parenthood just as much as their straight counterparts.

1.0.3.4 A new language to describe family relationships is required to accommodate these new concepts of the permanence beyond divorce of family relationships that are sealed in a marriage, and the extension of these relationships to gay marriage. For instance, if lesbian and gay married couples either have children through some form of assisted conception or surrogate pregnancy, or adopt children, should both partners be called the mothers or fathers of their children respectively? In other words, should it be possible for a child’s two legal parents (either on the birth or adoption certificate) to be of the same gender? Currently, in English law, it is in fact possible for a child to have two legal fathers or mothers in the case of adoption by a same-sex couple. Interestingly, though, the language that is used about such families – either the official, legal terminology, or the informal language used by parents or children of gay adoptions to refer to their family relationships – tends to avoid phrases such as ‘two fathers’ or ‘both my mothers’; the words ‘parents’, in the formal context, or ‘dad(s)’ and ‘mummy/-ies’ etc. in the informal context, are often preferred.)

This issue of gay parents is a very wide-ranging question covering a multitude of individual circumstances. But in theory, in a civil context, there is no absolutely compelling reason why a child should not have two official mothers or fathers. The sources of objection to this idea are threefold: the Christian tradition (and other religious traditions); an argument from human nature; and psychology. The basic objection itself is similar from all three angles, i.e. that a child needs both a mother and a father, because this is the natural way that a child is procreated, brought up and comes to negotiate its own role in society, including gender role(s).

It is generally accepted that children do need both maternal and paternal care figures and role models in their lives. But the sad truth is that these are very often not their natural mothers and fathers, particularly in the case of adoption, which is of special relevance in the context of lesbian and gay parents. If a gay couple adopts a child, it is probably better for that child, emotionally and legally, for both partners to be legal parents – rather than creating an inequality, and increasing the potential for emotional turmoil in the event of a relationship break up, by allowing only one of the individuals to be legally regarded as the mother or father. And the point about encouraging gay adoption to take place – if it is going to take place at all – in the context of gay marriage and officially recognised gay family relationships is that this should also reinforce the extended family structures that can provide an additional source of caring maternal or paternal figures (in the shape of aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.) to supplement the potential comparative absence of such figures from the child’s nuclear family.

One other observation that is worth making is that the argument in favour of the need for parental figures of both genders often presupposes that one or both of a child’s lesbian mothers, for instance, could not also serve as something of a model for fatherhood or masculinity. Gender should not be equated with anatomical sex. It is a commonly noted fact, for instance, that lesbian women often exhibit more conventionally masculine traits than typical straight women; and that gay men are often more overtly feminine or effeminate than their straight counterparts. So it is still possible for a child to learn about masculinity and femininity from same-sex parents. It is questionable, then, whether a child’s having two mothers or two fathers really does much long-term damage to their ability to develop their gender identity, sexuality and adult relationships in a ‘normal’ way; although the psychological impact of having same-sex parents should not be written off as insignificant. Maybe only time will tell what the long-term consequences will be.

Another question illustrating how society’s language to describe family relationships might need to evolve to reflect the changes I am advocating is how one would refer to ‘former’ spouses if a permanent relationship with a spouse and her / his family is deemed to be established in marriage. Common parlance would doubtless continue to employ terms such as ‘ex’ or ‘former’ to refer to previous spouses, even after any change in the legislation such as I am advocating. However, officially and logically, it might be better to designate these as ‘first’, ‘second’, etc. – e.g. a straight man who has married three times might refer to his previous wives as ‘my first wife’ and ‘my second wife’; and his third wife as ‘my current wife’.

You could argue that this is tantamount to sanctioning polygamy, in that it is implied that the conjugal relationship with previous spouses continues into subsequent marriages. And, in a sense, this is the case: a serial marrier of this sort would indeed be viewed as continuing to be related to his previous wives and their families. So the law would have to be explicit about the different types of relationship involved – family connection versus primary emotional / sexual relationship – and the rights and responsibilities in each. Determining a workable balance between the different relationships concerned would be part of the process of establishing the conditions and the settlement (financial and personal) for any marriage break up. It would in theory be possible for any such divorce and re-marriage arrangement to stipulate – within agreed limits – that wife No. 3 accepted that her husband could maintain an emotional or even sexual relationship with one or both of his previous wives, as the mother of his children for whom he continued to have a legal duty of care. Once you eradicate as part of the fundamental concept of marriage the idea that it involves an obligation for a permanent and exclusive sexual relationship between the spouses, there is no theoretical reason why situations of this sort should not arise if this was with the mutual consent of all the parties. Indeed, situations such as this do occur in real life today without the possibility to accommodate or negotiate them within the context of Christian-derived models for marriage; so that they frequently result in separation and divorce, which could be avoided if more realism about human behaviour and contemporary mores were built into the marriage model. All the same, the ‘current’ wife of such a serial marrier should have special privileges that preserve her right to reasonable treatment and for the promises made to her in marriage to be backed up by legal protection.

Is the husband in the above example in reality any more of a polygamist than under the current legislation, in which he would perhaps more accurately be described as a serial monogamist? The actual relationships and behaviour could well be identical in both contexts, even with respect to spouses maintaining sexual relationships with their previous spouses, as occasionally happens. The new model for marriage would recognise these realities while protecting the rights and security of all those affected by infidelity and, effectively, by polygamy.

Following on from the above observations, it would also be the case, for instance, that ‘former’ mothers-in-law or sons-in-law should now be called first, second, etc. mothers-in-law / sons-in-law. Familial relationship between non-genetically related uncles / aunts and nephews / nieces would also be viewed formally as continuing to exist after any divorce. Establishing in law the continuance of these types of relatedness could be important to ensure that strong relationships that already exist in the extended family are protected and promoted after a divorce has occurred. The same could be said, for instance, about relationships (and relatedness) between grandparents and non-genetically related grandchildren (e.g. in the case of adopted children or stepchildren). For clarity, it might be necessary to refer to someone as ‘my niece from my first marriage’ or as ‘my (step-) granddaughter from my son’s first marriage’, for example. Nieces and nephews themselves would not have the same dilemma, as ‘Auntie’ and ‘Uncle’ are often used for members of the extended family and for friends of the family, so there should normally be no need to explain the exact relationship in the terminology itself.

In summary, legal changes of this sort could have a positive impact on social practice, which is currently imprecise about what – if any – the continuing familial relationship is between divorced persons and their former spouses’ extended families. If the law stipulates that a continuing familial relationship exists, this creates the social conditions whereby personal relationships can also continue, where this is felt to be of mutual benefit to the parties concerned.

When it came to mapping out things like gay marriages and multiple marriages in family trees, these need not become significantly more complicated than they are already, as they mainly focus on genetic relationships in any case. More complex charting of relationships by marriage alongside genetic relationships could easily be added on. If the genetic relationship is not known – e.g. if a lesbian married couple deliberately decided to remain ignorant about which of the two women was the biological mother (for instance, in cases of in vitro fertilisation), and the identity of the biological father was also unknown – then the family tree could indicate both mothers as being the parents: instead of the usual pairing of father and mother as the next generational link, the tree would indicate two mothers. If the genetic mother is known, then the vertical line down the tree to the next generation could come from the biological mother, while a horizontal line indicating matrimony would still link the two women. In the same example, if the biological father were known, another type of horizontal line indicating parenthood could connect the genetic parents.

1.0.4 New processes for attempting to bring about reconciliation and for dissolving marriages would be required

Under the new reinforced model for civil marriages I am proposing, married couples should not be allowed to divorce unless a) they have been through a rigorous, formal procedure to determine whether their differences are irreconcilable, and b) a binding, enforceable legal agreement has been reached setting out the individuals’ continuing obligations towards their spouse, nuclear family (e.g. children) and even, in some instances, members of their spouse’s extended family; and also setting out their rights in relation to the same persons. These two processes would need to be carried out in a co-ordinated way, in that disputes over responsibilities, and over the use of wealth and property, are often central to marriage break-downs in the first place.

The type of process I would envisage is, in the first instance, a cooling off period of, say, at least two months following the decision by one or both partners to initiate divorce proceedings. This could be followed by anything from one to six months of consistent, verified attendance by both partners at counselling sessions provided by officially certified and monitored counsellors and organisations designed to effect a reconciliation, if possible, or to ascertain beyond doubt that a reconciliation is not possible.

The couple’s claims about their legal or moral rights in relation to money and property could also be discussed and assessed in a preliminary way as part of this formal process of counselling: one of the goals of the counsellor would be to try to disentangle any dispute over such material matters from the underlying emotional conflict. In this way, it might be possible to avoid further disputes over such matters if the ‘marriage-settlement’ process was taken forward to the next stage (winding up the marriage); or, indeed, if by resolving one side of the marital conflict (emotional or material), a resolution of the other aspect of the dispute could also be encouraged.

If, on the other hand, it is determined that no reconciliation of the married partners can be brought about, the second stage of the process would commence: determining a legal contract governing the divorce, which would set out explicitly the rights and responsibilities belonging to both parties consequent upon a divorce, and putting in place legal and financial measures to ensure that the terms of the contract are adhered to and enforced.

1.0.4.1 Aspects covered by the new form of divorce settlement could include:

· Financial arrangements: determining the extent and modality (e.g. one-off or continuous) of financial support, if any, to be provided by one of the divorcing spouses to the other and any dependants

· Custody and access: deciding whether one or both parents should be awarded custody of any children and stepchildren (including different arrangements for individual children, if desirable, most obviously in the case of children of previous marriages); and determining arrangements for access to the children for the other parent, including details such as the geographical distance that parents are allowed to live apart where this affects the provision of access; the amount and distribution (e.g. at weekends, holidays) of time the parent without custody is allowed or mandated to spend with their children; the particular needs, best interests and stated wishes of the children; etc.

· Details about continuing personal relationships between the parties to the divorce themselves, and between them and their extended families of which – under the new arrangements – both individuals continue to remain a part. This part of the settlement could provide a way to legally guarantee the right for continuing relationships and support between any children of the marriage and relatives such as grandparents, aunts and uncles. Provisions under this part of the ‘divorce contract’ could be divided between those that were legally binding and explicitly set out detailed practical arrangements (e.g. access to the children for grandparents); and those that represented a ‘Statement of Expectations and Intentions’, e.g. where one or both of the spouses expressed a wish to continue to maintain a meaningful friendship and working partnership with their spouse and her / his extended family after the divorce (whether shared children were involved or not). A statement of goodwill of this sort could be made even if the terms of the divorce meant the spouses no longer had either an automatic moral right or legal entitlement to a close relationship with their spouse beyond essential practicalities.

· Such a statement of expectations could also provide a formal framework for assessing the impact of any re-marriage on existing personal, material and sexual relationships. This is because part of the new arrangements for civil marriages would be that before a re-marriage could occur, there would need to be a review of the re-marrying person’s divorce settlement to see if any of its binding elements needed to be modified. This would require the consent of the re-marrying individual’s previous spouse. In addition, such a review would take into consideration the former spouse’s statement of expectations and intentions at the time of the divorce, in order to assist in drawing up a renewed statement taking the new marriage into account. This revised statement would attempt to reconcile, as much as possible, the expectations of the former and current spouses of the re-marrying person, so as to minimise conflicts and facilitate a good working relationship between them (necessary when mutual care for children is involved); and to ensure that, if the second marriage itself broke down, a formal statement existed setting out the expectations from the re-marriage that both parties had had when they contracted the marriage. The purpose of this would then be to streamline the process of determining the possibility of a reconciliation and (if that failed) the drawing up of a second divorce settlement.

A mutual statement of expectations could also be composed in advance of any first marriage, thereby serving as an informal alternative to a pre-nuptial agreement. (Couples could of course still conclude a formal pre-nuptial contract if they wished.) This would be a legally documented, but not necessarily narrowly enforceable, declaration concerning the economic, social and personal commitment that individuals were making to one another in their marriage. As such, it could help inform the reconciliation or divorce processes if the marriage did hit the rocks. The document could, for instance, spell out the couple’s expectations with respect to the exclusivity and permanence, or otherwise, of their sexual relationship as part of the more realistic, de-Christianised, but nonetheless legally and socially more responsible re-definition of the status of civil marriage I am advocating.

1.0.4.2 There should be tough legal provisions in place to enforce divorce settlements, if they are flouted, or to impose a settlement if one or both parties refuse to co-operate with the reconciliation and settlement process. The government has recently set out proposals along the lines I am suggesting, although I think the measures could go further. They could go as far as the facility to confiscate or freeze assets (not just withdraw money from bank accounts, as in the government's proposals), or the partial withholding or total withdrawal of custody rights if these were deemed to have been abused (e.g. if a parent who had been awarded custody on the basis that they remained a UK resident emigrated to Australia).

These tough legal penalties and incentives should have teeth. They are not something whose enforcement should be left to chance or to the ineffectual functioning of an anonymous bureaucracy such as the ill-fated Child Support Agency (CSA). Divorcing couples should have to disclose full details about their income and assets, as honestly and in as legally binding a way as they would when declaring these things for tax purposes. At the same time, the enforcement authority should have access to those assets and legal powers to freeze or confiscate them as a last resort to prevent divorcers from evading their responsibilities. Ultimately, some very stringent penalties should be available to enforce the decisions reached during the settlement process, including compulsory sales of assets and even imprisonment if the attempts to thwart a fair resolution of the financial and practical issues were considered to be especially serious or contemptuous.

1.0.4.3 Which agency or agencies would be involved in these processes of attempting to achieve a reconciliation, working to agree a divorce or separation settlement, and enforcement? Here again, my proposals diverge from those of the government. There would probably need to be a new national body to co-ordinate these tasks. But it would be advisable for these tasks to be run and financed at a local level, with only a loose national organisational framework to carry out necessary administrative and oversight tasks, and development of national strategy and policy. I envisage the new body as an offshoot of the current local register offices, co-ordinating the work of multiple service providers involved in the different processes, such as counsellors, lawyers, financial advisers and law-enforcement agencies. The work of this body could be financed largely – maybe exclusively – on the basis of fees paid by divorcing couples: perhaps on a percentage calculation linked to the value of the sums involved in the divorce settlement. There could be an initial upfront fee – by way of deposit – payable by the party suing for divorce.

The purpose of all these measures would not be to stigmatise divorce, as was the case in the past. But one objective they would be trying to achieve is to make couples think extra hard before going down the divorce route. Divorce should no longer be seen as an ‘easy option’ enabling parents to duck out of their responsibilities to children, partners or their wider family; or to provide an effortless transition to a new marriage. Indeed, if the reconciliation and settlement process resulted in a decision that, on balance, it was in the best material and emotional interests of all concerned that the marriage should not be dissolved, there might still be the possibility to negotiate some more flexible living and relationship arrangements as part of the mix. For instance, there could be an agreement that the wife and children of a husband who has been unfaithful could live in the marital home, while the husband would be free to live elsewhere with his new partner, so long as a new agreement on mutual rights and responsibilities (enshrined in a Statement of Expectations and Intentions) was adhered to.

1.0.4.4 What principles should be applied in assessing divorce settlements, especially the financial arrangements? In particular, should the principle of equality be systematically applied, i.e. the divorcing couple’s assets are simply divided into two equal portions? This is obviously a topical question as a result of recent legal cases. The spirit of the reforms that I am proposing here is that, wherever possible, the divorce settlement should aim to preserve a constructive relationship between divorcing individuals, particularly when the care of dependants is also involved. Simply splitting the couple’s material assets in half is not necessarily the best way to achieve this objective – whether this is because it provokes resentment on the part of a husband who sees his hard-won wealth being depleted by his ex-wife whom he sees – rightly or wrongly – as being motivated by greed; or whether, in a more general sense, this is because the focus is then directed towards material considerations rather than to the long-term emotional and practical consequences and needs of all concerned, not just the husband and wife.

So the new regulations should not just lazily enshrine the principle of equality, as if that would automatically compensate for any injustices that might be involved in the break down of the marital relationship itself, and for any harm suffered by grieving children. The outcome that is sought should be one of fairness: equity rather than equality of a type that is calibrated merely in mathematical, material terms. In the case of a family abandoned by a husband and father starting a new relationship, the aim should be to ensure that – wherever possible – the family does not suffer any disadvantages additional to those inherent to the family break up itself. This involves focusing on securing enough material assets so that the opportunities and the options in life that the wife and children had prior to the break up can be preserved or even enhanced, e.g. education choices for the children and opportunities for the wife (who may have sacrificed a career of her own for the sake of the husband and children) to make a fresh start in work and relationships.

To obtain a settlement of this sort does not necessarily involve splitting a husband’s wealth into two even halves. In fact, in cases where the husband is not especially wealthy, the consequence might be that more than half of his wealth was made over to his wife and children; so long as the husband’s ability to continue to develop his career and earning potential was not radically impaired. If this happened, it would also be unjust and ultimately counter-productive, as it would lessen the potential for the husband to a) improve his personal circumstances, and b) pass on some of the benefits to his first family as a voluntary gesture of care and goodwill, as much of the goodwill would have been eroded by the original settlement. This touches upon one potential flaw in the argument that the simplest and most practical alternative is always just to split a separating spouse’s wealth in two: this can damage the spouse’s ability and motivation to grow his or her wealth still further, which could then be of benefit to all concerned.

In addition, sanctioning the notion that jilted wives (or husbands) should automatically be entitled to half of their treacherous spouses’ assets could mean giving even more of a green light to greed as a motivation for getting married in the first place, and then for seeking a divorce. The point of the reforms that are being advocated here is that such motivations should not be rewarded or promoted by the system; that marriage should represent a serious commitment and set of obligations, which the divorce settlement is an attempt to uphold and fulfil.

In reality, however, cases where fabulous sums of money are in dispute are the exception rather than the rule; and the financial-settlement process would simply have to try to find the best compromise deal ensuring as fair a re-distribution of the family’s wealth as possible in the light of the needs of all concerned. Equally, it is in keeping with the principle of fairness that husbands who have been keeping their wives in a state of some luxury should expect to continue to have to do so, to a certain extent. The wives would be deemed to have a reasonable expectation of being looked after in this way, based on the commitment that was made to them through marriage, perhaps backed up by a Statement of Intentions and Expectations on the part of their then fiancé. As has been stated, a divorce should not be a way for husbands (or wives) to back out of their responsibilities, or for women (or men) to dig for gold.

1.1 Summary: marriage

Above, I have set out some new concepts, guidelines and suggested legislative changes relating to secular marriage in the UK. The core principles underlying these suggestions could be summarised as follows:

· Strengthening the cultural meaning and institutional support that is given to marriage

· Affirming marriage as a serious and – in its effects, at least – permanent commitment of two people to each other and to their extended families

· Making marriage fairer: in its availability to persons of any sexual orientation; in the insistence on the rights and needs of children and of the extended family in and beyond marriage; and in the resolution of problems through divorce or alternative arrangements

· Stripping marriage of some of the inherited Christian-derived expectations that it necessarily involves a permanent and exclusive sexual relationship between the spouses; and removing from it much of the associated guilt and blame when things go wrong and spouses stray. The aim of this is to focus on the continuing responsibilities that mature adult individuals have towards their partners, who have previously committed their lives and futures to them.

Part two to follow: new civil partnership arrangements.

National 'Britain Day': Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Eight)

2007-06-06T06:05:00.000Z

They were at it again on Monday: Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne called, among other things, for a national 'Britain Day' (our equivalent of Australia Day or America's July 4^th) as part of the drive to promote a stronger sense of Britishness – what the ministers called Britain's 'citizenship revolution'.

Anyone who has read any of my previous blog entries sub-titled 'Inventing Britain For the 21^st Century' will know that I am extremely sceptical about such 'Britology': essentially, the politically driven attempt to define core British values which – it is assumed or argued – will provide a framework for the people of the UK to become more culturally integrated and socially united.

For now, let me just pose a few questions (with some possible answers) and raise a few points concerning this agenda:

What date shall we have this 'Britain Day' on, then? Possible candidates: VE Day – a true celebration of a triumphant Britain having defended its values of freedom and tolerance (no, too historically and ethnically narrow); Trafalgar Day (are you kidding?); a date commemorating the end of the Battle of Britain (again, too militaristic and backward-looking); 1 May, which apart from being a traditional English feast associated with Morris Dancing, maypoles and the like (too English) is also the date when the 1707 Act of Union joining England and Scotland together to actually form Great Britain took effect (aaarghh!).
What actually are the core values that British people supposedly already have in common, and to which their adherence needs to be further fostered? I have argued before that these boil down to quite abstract, universal ideals, such as various flavours of freedom and equality, democracy, tolerance, decency, etc. One might call these values that the British are said to have in common the 'highest common denominator': they're the most top-level, general philosophical concepts that any reasonable person can buy into, whatever their faith, politics or ethnicity. But as such, do they really provide any additional force for unity, in the sense that people already in theory assent to these principles as expressed in their different cultural and religious traditions? And in any case, what is distinctively British, if anything, about these values? One might even say that by asserting these values as the core components of Britishness, Britishness is defined in relation to an abstraction away from specific, narrow ethnic and religious traditions to a sort of 21st-century global liberal humanism – as Britain typifies the coming together of all the nations of the earth in a new universal, secular culture and economy.

If Britain's identity is essentially a modernist abstraction away from historical divisions between races, nations and religions, then perhaps this is the underlying cultural basis for the bizarre design of the logo for the 2012 London Olympics, unveiled on the same day as the ministers' call for a Britain Day (see picture above). This logo contains very little that is recognisably British in any iconographic or representational sense: no historical monuments, geographical landmarks, national identifiers. It's a piece of abstract art reminiscent of the type of non-referential / conceptual works that annually compete for the Turner Prize. It does have something of the quality of commercial art of the type familiar from the British advertising industry, a sector in which Britain does indeed lead the world. It also suggests graffiti art: a manifestation of youth or pop culture which, perhaps it is true, is the nearest thing there is to a genuinely global culture embraced by people of all backgrounds.

While we're on the subject of the Olympics, these are one of the few major international sporting occasions when Britain actually competes as Britain, rather than in separate teams for each of the component 'nations' of Britain: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For the sake of encouraging greater identification with Britishness, rather than with separate national entities, would the ministers propose abolishing the separate football teams and associations for the four British nations? Not a chance! Well, if that's a non-starter, what chance the objective of winning hearts and minds to a reaffirmed Britishness?

Because that really is the problem: 'ethnic British' people tend to identify more as English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish than as British. Statistics from the UK National Statistics Office confirm this: more 'white British' people define their identity as English rather than British; while many more UK ethnic Asians and Afro-Caribbeans define themselves as British rather than English, Scottish or Welsh. So doesn't that show that we should be encouraging the newer ethnic and national communities coming into the UK to see themselves as English / Scottish / Welsh in the first instance? In fact, it is only in that way that they can really become British because they will be British in the way that indigenous British people are British: through the filter of national and regional traditions, culture and history that have all contributed towards the Britain of today. Moreover, if communities that still refer to themselves as Pakistani or Bangladeshi started to be accepted and accept themselves as English, then this would really mark a turning point of deep integration and the forming of genuine multi-ethnic nationhood.

Equally, it has historically been true that British identity has been most positively upheld only when the English identity that was, and still is to some extent, its heart was affirmed proudly and confidently. Any attempt to re-define Britishness in a way that implicitly or explicitly denies the possibility of an official or politically acceptable expression of English values and culture (Britishness as an abstraction away from narrow national traditions) is actually set on a course away from the traditional wellsprings of Britishness and is unlikely to command the assent of the English people (not defined in a narrow ethnic way but as those who identify as English).

Ultimately, the Britology project could be seen as striving to create a united nation (or should that be United Nations) of Britain that has never really existed in the past. This is one of the things that is evoked by the phrase 'citizenship revolution' used by the ministers in their opinion piece. The last time we had a 'citizenship revolution' in Britain (well, actually, it was in England) was in the English Civil War in the 17^th century, when our forebears got rid of the monarchy and we all became citizens of a Commonwealth (in today's terms, a republic). It's only really under a republic that one could imagine this project as having any chance of enduring success. A republic would finally sever the link between the Church and the state, as the monarch currently is both head of state and head of the Church of England (but not of Scotland). Thus, if the monarchy were done away with, Christianity could be denied any privileged claims to being the core faith and value system of England / Britain; and England could be removed from its effective status as the centre of the United Kingdom – the monarch being in the first instance King or Queen of England but certainly not of Britain.
Indeed, the more the talk is of Britain rather than the United Kingdom, the more there are grounds to suspect the presence of an underlying republicanism. A Republic of Britain would be one where its citizens now owed primary allegiance not to the outdated specifics of narrow nationalism, Christianity and indigenous ethnicity but to universal secular-progressive principles, and the global market economy and cultural market place. But would it be a nation that belonged to the politicians and the marketing guys more than to the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland?

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Four)

2007-06-04T09:54:00.000Z

In the preceding three entries, I've discussed three examples of how British society and culture deal with beliefs and behaviour that are considered to be 'beyond the pale': instances of radical intolerance or hostility towards the 'tolerant society' that are by that token 'beyond tolerance' – intolerable to the tolerant society. These examples are those of 'racism', 'terrorism' and 'anti-social behaviour'. Britain responds to these phenomena in a manner that is reminiscent of psychological censorship and repression. In Freudian terms, the super-ego (the authorities) suppresses the irrational, violent thoughts and desires of the id (the racist / terrorist / anti-social individual) from the conscious mind or ego (from the public domain) and then keeps jealous watch to make sure that these 'undesirable' tendencies do not re-manifest themselves openly – resulting in them being acted out in another way that eludes the scrutiny and sphere of operation of the super-ego. Hence, the racist, terrorist and lout are placed under a regime of watch and control (Celebrity Big Brother, Control Orders and ASBOs); but their thoughts and they themselves nonetheless elude their detention, because Big Brother has merely suppressed and displaced the forces that drive its enemies, not dealt with them and resolved the conflict.

Notice that I referred to these three forms of antagonism towards tolerance in inverted commas. One of the means by which censorship of these phenomena takes place is that particular individuals are stigmatised and scapegoated as representatives of the tendencies that society wishes to repress. In psychological terms, society projects onto those individuals its stereotypical image of the racist, terrorist and yob. These stereotypes in turn partly represent the racism, destructive violence and anti-social attitudes of normal, tolerant members of society themselves. By then suppressing those individuals and confining them to a limited, private space, society believes that it is dealing with racism, terrorism and mindless thuggery themselves – in the same way, and for the same reason, that respectable and respected members of the tolerant society believe they have resolved these very tendencies in themselves: by locking them up in a private, mental space that does not, and must not, be articulated openly.

In other words, all of us individually, and society as a whole, bear an uncanny resemblance to the racist, terrorist and hoodlum. They are as it were extreme manifestations of our own petty intolerances. But because we cannot admit to being intolerant, violent and anti-social in whichever respects apply to each of us, we end up wanting to suppress those extreme examples rather than deal with the underlying issues, which would involve confronting the 'enemy within' ourselves. That's not to deny that racism, terrorism and anti-social behaviour are real problems in the external world, for which practical solutions need to be sought. On the contrary, no real solution to these issues can be found if we're not prepared to admit that we're also an integral part of the problem.

Putting this in more straightforward language: to what extent really is any kind of understanding of the reasons for antagonism between the different races, nationalities and religions currently crowded together in the UK advanced by merely stigmatising Jade Goody as a racist and reprimanding Channel Four for not censoring material that offended the veneer of British inter-racial, multi-cultural tolerance and harmony? Similarly, we do not know whether the terrorist suspects that escaped from their Control Order detention the other week were really terrorists or not: one of the purposes of Control Orders is to suppress any possibility of public scrutiny of these cases and of an open debate on the grievances of those who might be drawn to terrorist-type violence. Tony Blair said we were placing too much emphasis on the civil liberties of the suspect. But if they're only suspects – assumed to be innocent until proven guilty – surely, they should be accorded every civil liberty. But 'suspect' in Blair's book seems to imply that that they are, and indeed they are treated as, guilty without trial.

Mr Blair himself, of course, has been widely accused of being the equivalent of a terrorist: a war criminal and mass murderer because of the direct and indirect consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Branding someone a terrorist or a war criminal is a way to distance and differentiate oneself from one's enemy: to refuse to see any parallel or linkage between your actions and those of your adversary. And so the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are not to be compared with those of 2,000 tragic victims of 9/11. The former are a consequence of 'justifiable' resistance to terrorism and defence of Western strategic interests; while the latter are mere terrorism – not an example of an albeit extreme and, in some cases, desperate response to the injustices for which the West is blamed in Palestine and to Western efforts to place the Middle East firmly under its control. And yet millions of tolerant British citizens gave Mr Blair their approval for the Iraqi foray – apparently accounting the lives of Arab civilians that would be lost as of less importance than those of the Westerners supposedly threatened by Saddam's WMD; just as the so-called Islamist terrorists apparently account the lives of Western 'infidels' as of less importance than those of Muslims.

And is the anti-social individual really any more anti-social than the mass of citizens who pursue their private interests and preoccupations with little concern for those who get left behind? The 'ASBP' (anti-socially behaving person) is stigmatised, on one level, precisely because (s)he is the symbol of the asocial society we have built: one where there is no longer any real shared vision of the type of society and communities we wish to create and sustain, but where individuals invest their energies and aspirations into their own private realm – their homes, their assets, their careers and relationships. The ASBP is someone who is left behind in this rat race. Deprived of the means, opportunity or ability to strive after these personal goals – and without any social or community network to re-direct their energies – they are people confronted by social indifference and lack of personal purpose. So in a sense, it is inevitable that they take it out on a society that has turned its backs on them and attempt to wreck our nice, quiet, comfortable lives. In this way, the ASBP is perhaps more social than the rest of us: they are crying out for the help and attention of a society that doesn't want to know. Rather than opening out and engaging in the social realm that is falling apart around us, our response to ASBPs exemplifies our own social alienation that has given rise to the anti-social behaviour in the first place: the ASBP is merely suppressed, placed under the terms of an ASBO – made to become merely another private individual that will no longer demand that we reach out to them from beyond the parapets of our homes-as-castles, thereby acting in a social, collective manner that could change all of our lives and begin to re-make a broken society.

Those who we ostracise as beyond tolerance – the racist, terrorist and anti-social person – are, ultimately, symbols of the limits of our own tolerance: of the prejudiced bigot, the supporter of violence and the selfish individualist that we all are to some extent. Overcoming these problems will involve defeating them in ourselves: to love our enemies, indeed, as ourselves.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Three)

2007-06-03T09:50:00.000Z

Britain is the most extensively watched society in the world, in terms of the number of CCTV surveillance cameras per head of population. Three weeks ago, a senior British policeman criticised the extent of CCTV usage, expressing concern that CCTV was spreading out from the cities into the villages and that Britain was in danger of becoming a Big Brother society.

In my February blog entry, I expressed the view that Big Brother – the Channel Four reality-TV show – was a symbol for British society as a whole, as a meritocracy defined in relation to increasingly amoral market forces. Is it also a symbol for Britain as a CCTV culture: one where recording and viewing of actions and events that have previously been beyond the public view is driven by fear of the hidden forces that threaten to undermine the superficial tolerance of the market society – fear of anti-social behaviour and intentions of every kind, from the random and aggressive vandalism of local yobs to the ruthless and systematic actions of the organised criminal or terrorist?

One might say that CCTV is a prime example of the privatisation of the public domain: not just because the operation of CCTV systems is contracted out to private companies, but because it corresponds to a view of the world that is one of the citizen obsessed by watching what is happening 'out there' in the public space that threatens to overrun the security and control of his / her private realm and create a world of chaos and violence. In this way, CCTV is a way of reclaiming for the private individual a public space that has increasingly come to be seen as alienating and hostile. But at the same time, CCTV confirms and perpetuates that alienation from the public sphere, in that responsibility for making our cities, roads and countryside a secure environment in which the citizen can go about his / her private business is transferred away from individual citizens and 'outsourced' to anonymous 'providers' that are not part of the community they are watching.

Indeed, the extent of CCTV deployment in Britain could be taken as an indicator of the degree to which 'old-fashioned' communities have broken down. In a real community, streets, towns and villages belong to the people who live there, and they in turn have a sense of belonging to their environment and to each other. This is what provides real security: people watch out for each other and care for their environment; and there is not so much of a divide between that external social and physical environment, and the 'private' realm: the one flows into the other. CCTV marks the increasing retreat of individuals into private existences separated from the social and physical environment: into their homes, careers, and ever more atomised nuclear families. The external world beyond these bastions is correspondingly not only perceived as an ever greater threat to assets that are all the more vulnerable the more value is invested in them; but it actually becomes a greater threat. This is because 'the outside' is a space that the individual has absolved him- / herself of responsibility for shaping into a human and caring environment, so effectively handing it over to persons who may not have the individual's or the community's best interests at heart. In this sense, perhaps the encroachment of CCTV into the rural environment demonstrates that communities have increasingly broken down there, too, as well as in the cities.

Despite all of this, surveys show that people generally feel more secure in going about places where CCTV has been installed than where it hasn't. 'Classic' CCTV is more effective at reducing casual crime (such as muggings, car crime and violence against the person) than systematic crime, such as drug or paedophile rings, and terrorism. But even classic CCTV has its limits. Offenders can learn where the blind spots of existing cameras are; and while CCTV has a relative deterrent effect, it cannot really prevent the determined thug or thief from carrying out his / her intentions. In other words, it is no substitute for individuals or, rather, communities taking charge of their own security, and being prepared to keep watch over the places where the camera can't penetrate and to intervene when a criminal act is taking place – and the more people are involved in intervening, the less is the risk of being hurt in doing so. But the absence of such a genuine community-wide response to petty criminality and anti-social behaviour generates the demand for more and more cameras to be deployed to cover those blind spots. And as for the petty criminal or anti-social individual themselves, we simply want them taken out of the public domain, whether through detention in prisons or their equivalent, or through so-called Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which – like anti-terrorist Control Orders – simply involve confining the offenders away from our embattled private lives into their own private spaces and homes. In either case, the problem of their intolerable behaviour is not resolved but merely displaced, to re-emerge elsewhere and on a subsequent occasion.

In other words, CCTV, as a response to behaviour that is beyond what a tolerant society can tolerate, illustrates the same ambiguities and inadequacies as Channel Four's Big Brother and Control Orders: while it appears to be a means to place radically intolerant / intolerable individuals under watch and control, it is actually a means of suppressing and censoring such intolerance rather than really dealing with it. The urge to watch such anti-social individuals is driven by a wish not to see them in a public domain that belongs to the tolerant, private individual who keeps themself to themself. The racist, terrorist or thug can continue to be a racist, terrorist or thug in a confined, private space away from our own. But this exile of the racist, terrorist or anti-social individual from our private world and consciousness means that ultimately (s)he will be free to operate in the public realm from which we have retreated.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Two)

2007-05-28T12:50:00.000Z

Big Brother has also failed in its duty of watchfulness in another respect, it was revealed last week. It appears that three persons who were confined to their homes under the terms of so-called 'control orders' have escaped. Control orders are a set of judicially sanctioned restrictions to certain individuals' liberties (effectively a form of house arrest). This measure is aimed at terrorist suspects, where there may not be enough hard and fast evidence to stand up in a court of law, but where the security forces are sufficiently concerned about individuals' activities to wish to impose forcible constraints upon them.

As a result of the escapes that were publicised last week, the Home Secretary (interior minister) John Reid stated that the UK might have to opt out of some of the clauses of European human rights legislation that limited the scope of control orders. He promised tougher anti-terrorist measures would be introduced before parliament by the end of June, when he and his boss Tony Blair step down. Tony Blair himself pitched into the fray yesterday (Sunday 27 May) by arguing in favour of a new police power to stop and interrogate suspects on the street. The prime minister stated, “We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong”. Well, that all depends on what qualifies you as a suspect, I suppose. And are the civil liberties of 'foreigners' any less important than those of UK subjects?

The control order regime, and the fact that it was sufficiently lax to allow these three suspects to escape, is another illustration of the British approach to dealing with radical intolerance, discussed in my last entry in connection with the Shilpa Shetty episode in Celebrity Big Brother. Control orders bear all the hallmarks of a process of suppressing and censoring people and ideas that are 'beyond tolerance', rather than dealing with them in a more publicly accountable way, or even in a more ruthless, systematic fashion that would definitely put them out of circulation. In this sense, control orders already do represent Britain's equivalent to Guantanamo Bay, a direction in which the Northern Ireland minister Peter Hain yesterday warned that the new proposed anti-terrorist measures were taking Britain.

Indeed, what more striking expression of the ambiguity of British 'zero tolerance' towards the radically intolerant could there be than control orders? Individuals are not locked up in a judicial limbo, like Guantanamo (which, to give him his 'credit', Tony Blair has argued that they should be); instead, they are 'politely' removed from the public domain and confined to the private realm of their homes. It is as if the intolerance exemplified by supposed terrorists – like the intolerance to which every citizen is prone to some extent – can be tolerated so long as it is confined to the privacy of the home and the individual's thoughts. And like any form of censorship – political or psychological – the setting up of control orders represents a means not just to suppress the individuals and ideas that are intolerable but also to censor the very mechanisms by which those persons and thoughts are suppressed: the process takes place in a sort of judicial no-man's land, outside of the normal operation of justice, where the facts of the case, the names of the individuals involved, and the values driving the activities of the 'suspects' are removed from the public domain.

In other words, control orders are a very British compromise between wanting / needing to act in a radically intolerant way towards those suspected of threatening the very tolerance upon which our liberal society rests, without having to admit that one is behaving in an intolerant manner. Because of this, control orders do preserve some elements of 'liberty' for those subjected to them: the liberties of private association, conscience and speech. We don't in fact seek to exercise mind control like the Orwellian Big Brother or, arguably, like the mental torturers of Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. The specific control order that applied to the three escapees must also have allowed them sufficient freedom to meet or communicate with each other to co-ordinate their flight. There is perhaps even an element of British fair play involved: we allow them a bit of slack, on the basis that our gut instinct is that what we're doing to them strictly isn't fair, and on the assumption that they might have the decency to play fair in their turn and not attempt to abscond – and then we get all indignant when they have the temerity to do a runner anyway!

There's an interesting parallel between the control-order evaders and the lack of editorial oversight on which the Shilpa Shetty furore has now been blamed. When what is involved is censorship of something intolerable rather than acknowledging it and attempting to deal with it openly (whether through honest discussion or due legal process), then what happens is that rather than watching the object of suspicion, it is all too easy to take one's eye off the ball: to stop looking at the real issue and the real danger. And then that real threat, which has escaped your attention because you thought you'd placed it under control and then stopped looking at, can elude you and come back to haunt you.

The evasion of the three control-order detainees represents the danger that their actions and ideas could once again impinge upon, invade, the public domain. But in a more profound sense, their evasion presents the threat of an invasion of our privacy. Our confinement of those suspects to 'their own' private space was a means to keep them away from ours. Our British society is a private society, where the individual jealously guards their right to freely pursue their own personal and professional goals (both ever more exclusively defined in the terms of the market society, or 'private enterprise') untrammelled by the claims that religious or ideological absolutism might wish to impose upon them. The 'terrorist' or the 'racist' extremist is a threat to this tolerance based on mutual respect and pursuit of each other's private goals. They must therefore be suppressed, and their intolerance (as is ours) must be relegated to its own private space: the control-order detainees' prison-from-prison that is their home, or the prison of the Big Brother House. If they should get out – even more importantly, if their intolerable ideas should get out and gain hold – then, like the 'racist' outbursts in Celebrity Big Brother, this would indeed be an unbearable invasion of privacy.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part One)

2007-05-26T06:24:00.000Z

Channel Four got rapped on the knuckles this week. An Ofcom report on last January's Celebrity Big Brother criticised it for broadcasting some incidents of abusive behaviour towards the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty without setting them in context or providing any opportunity for the inappropriate conduct and remarks to be challenged or reprimanded. The consequence was that around 45,000 viewers telephoned in to complain, many of whom regarded the actions of the offensive housemates as tantamount to racist bullying.

This was not in fact racist behaviour, as I've argued in some previous blog entries on the subject. Indeed, the Ofcom report makes no judgement as to whether the actions in question were racist; nor does Channel Four – in the formal apology that it has been obliged to make by Ofcom – accept that it was racist.

The issue that I am mainly interested in here is not a debate on what constitutes racism, or whether racism still has deep roots in British society. Rather, the whole episode casts a fascinating and somewhat dark light on what might lie behind the much-vaunted British value and national characteristic of tolerance; and on how we react to those who attack and threaten the socio-economic system we have built up around it. The question it raises is, how do we – as a nation – tolerate those who are intolerant: those who question the whole liberal basis of our tolerance and who may even seek to overthrow it altogether?

The British solution is not to seek to take on and eradicate intolerant movements and their representatives through direct political action, repressive measures or draconian laws. Such an approach would itself violate the principles of tolerance for the freedoms of others, even – within reason – those who portray themselves as the enemies of our own freedoms. The British method is to suppress and mute intolerance: to censor it and remove from the public domain into the private realm. In this way, we act towards the intolerance of others as we do to our own: we wall it up in the privacy of our thoughts, hearts and homes, and do not allow it to voice and manifest itself in our interactions with others – at least, if we want to be thought reasonable and respectable.

In the case of Big Brother, a group of private individuals are indeed locked away into a sort of home. But here, the reverse process seems to be at work: the people concerned are confined in the Big Brother House in order to be exposed in the public domain, not hidden from it. However, precisely because of the intense public scrutiny to which the housemates are subjected, along with the dictatorial rules that are imposed on them, the participants are placed in a situation where they do in fact have to suppress and hide away their intolerant reactions to one another, along with their self-seeking stratagems and tactics to take advantage of one another and enhance their chances of winning the game. Often, of course, within the intimacy of the 'Diary Room', the contestants will 'open up' and express their irritation or prejudices towards one or other of their co-residents, thereby covering up an attempt to damage the chances of their rivals under the guise of an all too understandable private exasperation at someone they cannot stand – a feeling that they must suppress within the 'public' domain of their interactions with other contestants inside the house.

The whole 'premise' of the Big Brother House is that it blurs the distinctions between the public and private realms in this way. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the model of confinement within a private space being designed to at once suppress and expose in the public domain individuals' private thoughts and feelings is complicated still further. In this case, the contestants are already well known to the public. Their sojourn in the BB House therefore appeals to the audience's curiosity to peer through celebrities' public personae and catch a glimpse of their private selves (and even their 'private parts', let's be honest). By contrast, the appeal for the participants themselves is almost the opposite: that the show offers them some further 'exposure', puts them in front of the public eye and offers them a chance to present an attractive public persona, thereby potentially revitalising or relaunching a flagging career.

In this sense, the Shilpa Shetty episode clearly delivered on Celebrity Big Brother's dual selling point: exposing normally suppressed intolerant and aggressive attitudes to the public view; and providing an avenue for a fading Bollywood star to launch her career as a Western movie actress and celebrity. However, the programme has now been adjudged guilty of being too honest and realistic: too much 'reality TV', in fact, and not enough mindless entertainment. Indeed, you could say that the show failed to be sufficiently Big-Brother with regard to the naked hostility that was shown towards Shilpa, expressed and justified – in the eyes of those responsible – in the terms of cultural prejudice and stereotype.

The original Big Brother – the Orwellian one, in the novel 1984 – did not merely seek to watch over the private actions and intimate thoughts of citizens; but, where these were ideologically intolerable, the state sought to transform those thoughts from within by inventing a new form of language – Double Speak – that represented a sort of knowing lie that the individual came to believe because the old honest language came gradually to be forgotten. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the show failed to make the outbursts of Jade Goody and others 'acceptable' by presenting them within an editorial context that allowed a politically correct spin to be placed on them and appropriate sanctions on the offending individuals to be imposed. In other words, the programme merely exposed the private prejudices and intolerant reactions of its contestants but did not – unlike its Orwellian predecessor – seek to transform them by making the transgressors publicly confess to their 'crimes' and commit themselves to not 're-offending' in the same way.

Celebrity Big Brother got its brief wrong: its purpose is not merely to expose the ugly face of hidden intolerance but, in fact, to participate in society's attempt to suppress it, in part by narrativising a process whereby individuals come to recognise their faults, reform their ways and reconcile their differences. The object of Big Brother's systematic surveillance, in fact, is precisely not to watch intolerance but to censor it from the public domain. The editorial failings of the programme boiled down to the fact that viewers were indeed forced to watch a spectacle of intolerance. Big Brother may well have been watching the housemates, but it wasn't vigilant: it didn't see what was going wrong early enough in order to prevent it from escalating almost to the status of a crime.

And now, in order to prevent a recurrence, the ordinary, non-Celebrity version of the programme that is once again starting up will itself be watched over. The author of the Ofcom report stated: “I . . . welcome the measures that they have taken to ensure proper and rigorous oversight. We will be watching very closely to ensure that these have the desired effect”. The Commission for Racial Equality also said it would be “keeping a close eye” on the new series of Big Brother: “We will be monitoring it carefully to ensure that such disgraceful behaviour is not repeated”, a spokesman said. And so we now have the 'spectacle' of the watchdogs of the media and of political correctness watching over Big Brother in order to ensure that as Big Brother watches the show's contestants, it keeps a watchful eye over what it is acceptable or not for its viewers to watch. More a case of 'Big Brother, you're being watched' than 'Big Brother is watching you'.

But the one thing we won't be watching, if the regulators get their way, is any all too realistic scenes of unacceptable intolerance.

Let the Little Children Come Unto Me: Why the Church Should Not Shut Its Doors To Children In Need Of Adoption

2007-03-29T07:31:00.000Z

It has been said before – the Catholic Church itself has said it – that it is the needs of the children have been largely ignored in the debate over the Church’s right, or not, to be exempted from new UK legislation which, it is claimed, would prevent Catholic adoption agencies from turning away same-sex applicants to adopt children. Following a House of Lords vote on 21 March ratifying the Equality Bill, the Communities minister Ruth Kelly (herself well known as a devout Catholic) said that the measures would deliver “dignity, respect and fairness for all”. By this, she was of course referring essentially to gay adults, including those wishing to adopt, not to any dignity, respect or fairness that might have accrued to child candidates for adoption as a result of the new law.

What follows here is a continuation of the discussion in my previous blog (dated 21 March) about whether the Church is acting correctly in its official opposition on principle to gay adoption. Here, I am examining the question in relation to the justice, or otherwise, of the Church’s moral condemnation of homosexuality, which is the ultimate reason for its opposition to same-sex adoption. Consequently, most of the ensuing discussion concentrates on these issues and is, to that extent, also focused on the adult aspects of adoption. Nonetheless, my main concern is to question whether, ultimately, the Church’s opposition to same-sex adoption could not also be seen as an injustice towards children.

It is indeed the needs of the children that should be to the forefront of the thinking and decisions in this matter. And yet the Church itself – perhaps partly as a tactic to try to win the exemption sought – has threatened to close down its adoption agencies if the Bill passes into law, which – failing an unprecedented last-minute refusal on the part of the Queen to give her consent – it now certainly will. Is this any way to treat the needy, hard-to-place children for whom Catholic agencies have been so successful in finding new parents and families? Those children will still be there after the Equality Bill becomes law. Is the Church really going to turn its back on them, in defiance of its founder’s call to his followers to let the little children come to him and to welcome the kingdom in the shape of a child? Who is going to ensure that true respect is paid to the dignity of those children and that they are treated fairly: with the justice that is of the kingdom?

That justice is expressed through right judgement. Hitherto, the Church has judged that gay couples are intrinsically unsuited to become parents through adoption. Is the Church always right in making this judgement? The Church’s position is based on an a priori and its established teaching: that because gay sex is ‘morally wrong’, gay sexual couples cannot on principle provide the basis for a family life in which children will be brought up to understand and practice sound morality and, one hopes, faith. In this way, the Church might be said to pre-judge the unsuitability of prospective gay parents before it has even taken a look at them.

In theory, this is no more than the consistent application of a universal moral principle. In practice, however, this pre-judgement is inseparable from prejudice: condemning and repudiating others, based on one’s preconceptions of them, before allowing oneself the opportunity to get to know them and respond to their common humanity. It does not matter if those preconceptions are sustained by a moral law that one accepts through faith as ultimately unquestionable if, at a human level, what is at work is a refusal to be open to people who do not share one’s beliefs, culture or lifestyle: a refusal to offer them love, as Christ commands, and not to judge them in case that judgement is also made against oneself.

Despite what has been generally said, the dispute between the Church and the British state over the new legislation centres more on this issue of prejudice than on that of discrimination. Or rather, because there is a perception that the Church is prejudiced against gays and lesbians, its unwillingness to accept applications for adoption from them is interpreted as discrimination based on prejudice against persons of a particular sexual orientation. Technically, of course, it is not discrimination of this sort: it is a rejection of gay adopters on the basis of character, personal values and ‘immoral’ behaviour. You could call this ‘moral discrimination’, i.e. a judicious, rather than prejudicial, differentiation between right and wrong ways of life. And yet, in practice, the distinction between condemning the sin but not the sinner is almost impossible to uphold in this instance. It really is as if because unrepentant sexually active gay persons are adjudged to be in a state of grave sin, they are also considered to be bad people in themselves: unsuited, at any rate, to be awarded custody of other people’s children. But which of us is without sin, even grave sin (or at least the capacity for it)? And does that make us unsuitable as parents?

Secular society, on the other hand, tends to assume that parenthood is a fundamental human right. The concept of human rights rests in part on the belief that all basic human needs are inherently good and should be allowed the freedom to be fulfilled, with the qualification that the exercise of that freedom should not encroach on the freedom and needs of other human beings. The wish to have children and carry out the role of a parent is considered as one such fundamental human need. How one describes that need is quite important, as will become clearer later in this discussion: whether you call it something like the ‘reproductive instinct’ or the ‘need to parent children’. In any case, support for the view that gay couples should enjoy the same adoption rights as straight couples is based on a concept of a ‘right to parenthood’ that is common to all human beings, whether gay or straight. This suggests another way to understand the accusations that Church adoption agencies are discriminating against gay couples by refusing to consider them as potential parents: this is seen as denying them a basic human right.

The Church’s view, of course, is that parenthood is not a right but a privilege or, more strictly, a calling. That calling is itself seen as inseparable from the vocation to marriage, defined as the sexual union of a man and a woman in the love and mystical Body of Christ. So the Church’s opposition to same-sex adoption rests on a logical reasoning to the effect that gay couples cannot have a genuine calling to have children, as their relationship and sexual conduct are of a type that is incompatible with the mystery of conjugal union and the biology of conception, processes which are intended by Christ to take place in unison within the state of matrimony. The existence of a vocation to marry also of course implies a right to marry and have children; but this right is dependent on the vocation and is therefore by definition reserved for straight persons.

On this basis, however, there ought also to be some straight people that the Church would not consider to be suitable or ‘legitimate’ parents: those not capable of sustaining a marriage and / or of giving their children the loving, secure family upbringing they need in order to become morally responsible and personally fulfilled individuals. But would the Church really be prepared to openly declare that such persons either did not have the right, or were not worthy of the right, to be parents? In the past, it could be said that the Church did act in this way by, for instance, stigmatising women who had children out of wedlock and ensuring that their children were taken away from them to be either adopted or brought up in the care of the Church itself. But this is not something that the Church today, at least in secularised and economically developed Western societies, is prepared to articulate openly; nor are such views probably regarded as acceptable any more by the majority of the Church’s members.

If the inability to sustain a marriage and bring up children in a stable family environment is no longer seen as disqualifying one from being a parent, even by the Church, then it is clear that the existence of a marriage has ceased to be a defining criterion for assessing whether a calling to parenthood might exist: the ultimate remaining deciding factor is the biological component of traditional marriage or, more accurately, its socio-biological component – heterosexual sex. It is indeed hard to see how the Church could maintain its insistence on marriage as a sign of a vocation to parenthood in an era when marriage break-downs have become so normal and belief in the Christian foundations of marriage has evaporated to such a large extent. If there is at least heterosexual desire and behaviour present on the part of parents and step-parents, then a theoretical link between a calling and right to parenthood, on the one hand, and a vocation to marriage, on the other, can be posited: it can be said that a core ‘will to marry’ (indissociable from heterosexuality per se) may be present in such couples or individuals. And it is to be hoped that in time, if those unmarried parents come into contact with the right influences (including that of the Church), they might be able to respond to God’s calling for them to marry and thereby ‘legitimise’ their parenthood, so long as it is permissible in Church and / or civil law for them to marry. Ultimately, the Church’s acceptance of unmarried straight parents at least preserves a link between parenthood and the normal biological processes through which parenthood was intended by God to come about – in a time when artificial-conception techniques, surrogacy, cloning and such like threaten even to tear down the last links between the origins of human life, and the love of a man and a woman.

But in a sense, this is wanting to have it both ways: ‘you don’t need to be married to be a suitable parent; but you do need to be straight (linked with an underlying predisposition towards marriage)’. In practice, as I have said, this boils down to identifying the ‘right to parenthood’ with heterosexuality alone. And this in turn is based on a similar but, in fact, more restrictive notion of what human rights rest upon, i.e. the ‘order of nature’. Whereas the secularist would say that the right to parenthood derives from the fact that all human beings – or at least, the great majority – experience the desire or need to become parents, irrespective of their sexual orientation; the Church’s view would appear to be that it is against the order of nature for gay persons to wish to become parents because, in their case, that urge is invested in a form of sexual desire and behaviour that is counter to the natural means that God has created (heterosexual desire and intercourse) for this urge to be realised.

Now, it is possible and, on one level, logical to hold the view that gay sex acts are unnatural and, by that token, morally wrong. But is it necessary to conclude that, because a person has a predisposition to expressing him- or herself homosexually, their wish to become a parent is also unnatural and wrong? It is logical to reach this conclusion only if one believes that such persons’ wish to become parents is an expression of what I have termed their ‘reproductive instinct’, which they in turn are seen to be acting out in their sexual behaviour and relationships, i.e. that they might wish to father or mother children naturally – biologically – through their sex lives. In other words, the judgement that the wish of gay people to be parents is unnatural rests on an assumption that this wish is directly expressed in their sex lives and is indissociable from their attraction to persons of the same sex.

This assumption involves a reduction of sexuality to reproduction (i.e. that it is the same as, or at least always expresses, the reproductive instinct) and an assimilation of gender to anatomical sex. By this, I mean that this view of sexual relations assumes that descriptions of sexual desire and activity as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ are always unambiguous and absolute: that gay sex always reflects the absolute presence of an underlying desire and personality that one can characterise without ambiguity as ‘homosexual’ and therefore as the diametric opposite of ‘heterosexual’; ‘disordered’ as opposed to ‘ordered’. In order to set up this opposition, it is necessary to assimilate anatomical sex (the possession of the male or female reproductive organs) with psycho-social gender (the possession of a male / masculine or female / feminine gender identity or personality). In other words, on this view, gay sex always involves a man (or a woman, of course) whose gender identity and body are both male (female) being attracted to other men (women) whose identity and body are also perceived by them as male (female).

But does sexuality of any sort – gay or straight – work in this unambiguous way? All people arguably have personalities made up of varying combinations of masculine and feminine characteristics, or what they or society identify as masculine or feminine traits. Equally, men and women – straight as well as gay – are attracted in differing degrees to gender characteristics in other people that are associated with their own sex or gender as much as with the ‘opposite sex’. So it is psychologically accurate, at least, to say that most (perhaps all) heterosexual desire and personalities exhibit aspects of attraction to the same sex or gender, and vice-versa: all homosexuality exhibits characteristics one might normally think of as heterosexual, if one extends the definition of sexual orientation to include the idea of ‘gender orientation’ – attraction to the same or other gender alongside, and combined with, attraction to the other or same sex; and that in almost any combination.

Put more simply and conventionally, sexuality and gender are rarely a straightforward matter of either / or: either gay or straight; either feminine or masculine. On the contrary, they are a continuum. If one accepts this proposition, one implication is that it is no longer possible to uphold the view that ‘homosexual’ desire / activity, and the instinct to reproduce / wish to be a parent that is supposedly indissociable from this homosexuality, are completely unnatural and wrong: in diametrical opposition to heterosexual conduct and procreativity that are fully natural and – when potentially or actually expressed in marriage – morally justified.

What is involved here is not so much a moral validation of active homosexuality but rather a refutation that it is possible to maintain rigid categorial and ontological distinctions between homosexuality and heterosexuality. This is only really a problem, in relation to the Church’s teachings, if it is regarded as an absolute truth that sexual desire and behaviour, the reproductive instinct, and the wish to become parents are all, as it were, co-terminous: that the presence of any of these terms and of the realities they denote always implies the presence of both other terms and realities. Because then – if one accepts the idea of a gender / sexuality continuum as described above – where there is gay desire and behaviour, there would also be (inseparable from that) some element of straight desire and behaviour; and hence, bound up with homosexual activity, there would also be a reproductive instinct and a wish to become a parent that is not just like that of straight persons (analogous to it) but is that of (is the same as that of) straight persons. And, conversely, straight persons’ sexual activity, reproductive instinct and wish to parent could be seen as being really in part homosexual: the expression of a ‘same-sex’ / ‘same-gender’ attraction and union alongside, or bound up with, ‘other-sex’ / ‘other-gender’ desire – the mystery of that complementarity between the same and the other perhaps being best captured in the very conjugal idea of union between male and female, between the self and the other (self).

As I have said, these conceptual difficulties arise only if one regards active homosexuality as necessarily expressing a (by definition, distorted) urge to procreate on the part of persons engaged in it. This is another example of the contradictions one can get caught up in if one has a concept of gay sex that is essentially analogous to the Catholic concept of the purpose of straight sex as realised in marriage: that it is inherently both unitive and procreative (see the discussion on this in my last blog, dated 21 March 2007). At the same time as this analogy is posited by the Church in the very terms in which the phenomena of homosexuality are described (‘union’, ‘procreation’, ‘nature / natural’), its validity is denied. One consequence of this is that there is in fact no formal doctrinal language in which the distinctive lived experience of homosexuality can properly be described, because that experience is simply framed from the outset as the antithesis of meaning and truth: ‘improper’, invalid, disordered, meaningless, without purpose, loveless, divisive (as opposed to unitive), destructive (as opposed to procreative) – dead.

Apart from anything else, the refusal to accept that there is any analogy or overlap between heterosexuality and homosexuality completely ignores the experience of bisexual persons. In order to maintain the rigid separation between heterosexuality and homosexuality, bisexuality would have to be described (if it were described at all) as a form of split personality. A psychologically more accurate way to view bisexuals would be as persons in whom the distinctions between gay and straight (and, to a variable degree, between masculine and feminine) break down more than they do for persons whose sexuality lies more towards the gay or straight end of the spectrum.

The necessity to uphold a rigid ontological distinction between straight and gay exists, as I have indicated, in order to make a clear moral distinction between active heterosexuality and active homosexuality viewed as an inherent expression of the reproductive instinct and / or the wish to be a parent: the one is ‘natural’ and capable of being validated, realised and justified in marriage; the other is unnatural, and is therefore incapable of being realised, redeemed and elevated to the level of a true union in and with Christ through the sacrament of marriage – grave sin. But if one accepts the view I have advanced that the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality is in fact quite loose and fluid, then it makes much more sense to configure the relationship between the various desires and actions involved in a different way. OK, describe gay desire and activity as unnatural (and thereby wrong) if you wish. But surely, the root of what is ‘wrong’ about homosexuality, on this view, is the very dissociation between the gay individual’s or couple’s sex life and any wish they might have to reproduce and / or become parents; not the fact, as implicitly posited in the Church’s teaching, that those persons’ urge to procreate is indissociable from their sexual activity.

So it would be more accurate to describe the situation as one where gay persons do indeed have a reproductive instinct; but instead of this being channelled into sexual relationships and activities which present a strong chance of realising this drive to procreate (marriage or just heterosexual sex), the chosen gay sexual activities and partners are not ones that will enable this instinct to be fulfilled. So you could say that gay sex and relationships, to a significant if unquantifiable degree, precisely do not express the reproductive instinct of the persons involved. But, because of this, the wish of such persons to exercise the role of a parent does not just evaporate and can take expression instead in a desire to become a parent through non-natural means, such as adoption: ‘unnatural’, indeed, but in quite a different sense than that which is intended by the Church.

What can be seen as destructive, disordered and immoral about gay sex is this very splitting of the divinely intended unity between, on the one hand, the sexual expression of the love that two persons have for one another and, on the other, the divinely intended fulfilment of that love in the creation of new life (children) that is ‘of one flesh with’ the two persons that have joined themselves together in love. But if gay sexual desire and activity can be condemned – if they are seen as what manifests and actualises this disjunction and deviation from God’s purpose – must the mutual love of two persons of the same sex, and their wish for that love to be fulfilled in parenthood by means such as adoption, thereby also be inherently damnable? Surely, one condemns such love, or denies its validity or existence, at one’s peril, since love is the outpouring of the Spirit, and to condemn the Spirit is the gravest form of blasphemy. Indeed, it is the wish that some gay couples have for their love to find a more complete expression in parenthood that could in fact be said to reveal the quasi-conjugal and the spiritual character of that love; even if that wish – because of the ‘sin’ of homosexual sex – cannot be realised in the flesh through the union of matrimony and the procreation of children of one’s own. This love, and the associated wish for parenthood, can be seen as truly spiritual in character because – like marriage – it reflects the very mystery of the Trinity: the Spirit as the gift and union of love between the Father and the Son (the husband and wife, the lover and the loved) from which all life proceeds, and in which all life is held.

So it could be said that what is sinful about active homosexuality – if one accepts the proposition that it is ‘sinful’ at all – is that it takes something that God has given us (ultimately, in order to share in his own love, life and work of creation / redemption) and diverts it away from that divine purpose. The lived out effects of this fundamental orientation of the will away from God’s purpose can indeed be disastrous, in that sexual pleasure and self-expression can then appear to be goals in themselves, without any inherent reference to love, the divine and the creation of new life. And this can lead the individual to turn their back on God, and define their sexuality and their goals in life in opposition to God, or to any notion of a calling to serve God and dedicate one’s life to him. But equally, this rejection of God and of faith is also often a reaction to the judgement of Christians that homosexual desire and relationships do indeed place the gay individual in opposition to a Christian way of life and to any possibility of living out a Christian calling – other than a calling which simply denies that sexuality: a vocation to celibacy or an expectation that gay persons could be ‘healed’ and ‘converted’ to heterosexuality.

Far more just and Christian, it seems to me, to take the view that the fact of a person’s being homosexual, or bisexual, opens up the possibility of distinctive ways to witness to, and live out, the love of God – based on the experience of the continuing love and compassion of Christ despite (indeed, in some ways, because of) their sexual sins. And one of the ways in which gay and lesbian persons could be especially suited to witnessing to God’s love is through adoption. This is because it is the sadness (as well as the sin) of homosexuality that a gay couple’s sexually expressed love cannot result in their having children of their own. But if one has followed my arguments up to now, loving gay couples still have a natural (God-given) wish to have and love children as parents, even if not as the natural (biological) progenitors.

If gay persons’ wish to become parents can indeed be prompted by the love of Christ acting through their hearts, whether those persons acknowledge Christ or not (and ultimately, the Church would say that it is its role to determine whether this ‘vocation’ exists), then is the Church really exercising right judgement in automatically excluding the idea that adoption by gay couples could in some – perhaps many – cases be precisely in the best needs of certain children?

I began this article by stating that it is the needs of the children that should be considered as paramount; but I have ended up discussing at length issues of right judgement and justice towards gay persons and couples in this area. But the two questions are not distinct: if an injustice is being committed towards gay couples by automatically ruling them out as adoptive parents, this means that love that would have been given to those children by those prospective parents can no longer be given. And it is not only those adoptive parents’ love that is prevented from being expressed but also God’s loving purpose in calling those gay couples (prompting them in their hearts) to transcend the potential for self-centredness and godlessness inherent in their sexuality; and to realise a form of love that is in its fundamentals (its likeness to divine love) analogous to the love that the real (biological) parents would normally have been expected to give to those children.

If the Church is thus standing in the way of letting children come towards a love that is of God’s kingdom, is it not failing in its redemptive mission? This is not just a mission to let children know they are loved, thus giving them the freedom, perhaps only later in life, to be open to the even greater love of Christ; it is also a mission to engage openly and lovingly with gay persons, and to let them experience the saving truth that they are loved unconditionally by Christ even though they sin. What better lived example of the unconditional love of Christ could there be for gay persons than the unconditional love of a child? Is the Church serving the kingdom by preventing gay couples from encountering that kingdom – indeed, encountering Christ – in the open, loving hearts of children?

2007-03-21T06:34:00.000Z

Can Gay Adoption Be Reconciled With Christianity?

In the recent debate about whether Catholic and other religiously affiliated adoption agencies should be allowed an exemption from new UK social-equality legislation that would oblige them to consider applications to adopt children from gay and lesbian couples, it was taken as a given that imposing this obligation on those agencies would be tantamount to forcing them to act against their religious principles. This controversy formed the subject of three entries to this blog at the time (24 and 25 January), in which I discussed some of the delicate issues of conscience and discrimination involved.

The present blog entry is an exploration of the ethical arguments in favour of allowing same-sex adoption from a Christian, and more particularly Catholic, standpoint. I attempt to open up a number of perspectives on the issue that add up to a plea to look beyond the Church’s block repudiation of same-sex adoption (and of same-sex unions upon which it is based) to consider how we might in fact discern the action of the divine love and Spirit in the motivation of at least some of the gay couples involved, and in the cry of children in need of adoption, whether by conventional male-female or same-sex parents. As such, my hope is that this discussion may be of some use to Catholic adoption agencies in their deliberations about how to respond to the fact that no exemption from the legislation was accorded to them, and in their decisions about whether or not to comply and stay in business. This question once more became topical this week, when another vote on the new legal provisions was held in the House of Commons, and opposition to an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies again prevailed.

The question is essentially as follows: must adoption by same-sex couples always be seen as wrong, viewed from the standpoint of Christian principles? The official position of the Catholic Church is clear: same-sex adoption is a ‘grave sin’ – the kind of sin that excludes any good and is all black, without any shade of grey. Nonetheless, it is still legitimate to ask whether there are any possible benefits at all to be gained from adoption by same-sex couples – for the children, as opposed to the adopters. It is clear that there is a great shortage of adoptive parents, in the UK and throughout the world if one considers the issue of orphaned children in developing countries, recently highlighted by the pop star Madonna’s adoption of a Malawian boy. In this light, could the adoption by gay couples of children who desperately need parents not be seen as at least being of potential benefit to them? In other words, is it better, morally, for some children who are desperately in need of parents either to be adopted by loving, dedicated gay couples; or not to be adopted at all – given that there aren’t enough straight couples who are seeking to adopt?

Given this lack of suitable prospective male-female adoptive parents, it would seem to be a shame to dismiss out of hand the idea that gay couples could help to make up some of the shortfall, simply on the basis that any good they might be able to do for the children would be outweighed by the ‘evil’ of their sex lives. I suppose if one really believes that a sexually active gay lifestyle or relationship of whatever quality or duration constitutes grave or mortal sin, then it does follow logically that it would be better for children who might otherwise have been adopted by same-sex couples not to be adopted at all. But Catholics in particular need to be really sure that they genuinely hold that the moral balance is always, indeed on principle, tipped against same-sex adoption. One reason for this is that Catholic opposition to abortion leads the Church to argue in favour of an increased use of adoption as one of a number of alternatives to terminations. But if just a relatively modest proportion of the vast number of terminations that take place in the UK each year were replaced by adoptions, then adoption agencies would be faced by an even more acute crisis of insufficient numbers of persons seeking to adopt. If one doesn’t agree that gay couples with a long-term, loving commitment to one another are living in a perpetual state of grave sin because of their sexual activity, then it would be possible to emphasise a different aspect of the moral law in one’s consideration of this issue: the Christian call to love children. From this perspective, enabling vulnerable, potentially unwanted children to benefit from the love that gay people long to give them – even if, in part, this might be because there aren’t enough straight people to take those children on – could almost be seen as a Christian duty. Consider the alternatives for some children: a childhood spent in care or foster homes, subject to the risk of sexual abuse and deprived of the security of a loving family environment, resulting in a greater tendency to be exposed to the malign influences of crime, temptation and drugs as life unfolds.

But I hear the cry go out, ‘moral relativism’! In other words, I could be accused of trying to make out that same-sex adoption can serve an intrinsically good purpose, whereas what it really is, even in my own example, is the lesser of two evils (i.e. a lesser evil than children not finding any adoptive parents at all). But that’s making quite a judgement (arguably, an unchristian one) about the parental love and security gay people are able to give the children they adopt: that it’s morally flawed or a form of ‘tainted love’. Furthermore, we live in a world of moral relatives and compromises in which sometimes we just have to make a decision about what is the best course of action available to us in the circumstances – which is often not the same thing as the ideal option, in moral terms. Putting this another way, the best of two practical alternatives is often the way it is given to us to perform good, rather than this being merely the lesser of two evils.

There are too many examples to mention of these situations where we sometimes have to choose the least black of two grey areas. Possible examples range from momentous moral decisions (e.g. whether to go to war) to the trivial but nonetheless morally significant choices we make on a daily basis: ‘should I buy that DVD that the kids have been clamouring on about all week – which will give them a lot of happiness for a few hours – or should I give the money to that person collecting for Cancer Research, which could actually save a life?’; ‘should I exceed the 30-mph speed limit by 5 mph to make sure I arrive at the school in time to pick up the kids, at the risk of not being able to stop in time if a kid runs onto the road?’

The ethical questions about same-sex adoption are in reality a similar choice between two morally mixed alternatives: ‘is it right to let gay couples give their love to adopted children, or to deny them and the children this opportunity in order to protect the children from being conditioned into accepting (and even practising) an immoral lifestyle?’ Who can apportion the degree of good and evil, right or wrong, discernment or lack of it, on either side? We just have to be guided by love – as Christians and as human beings.

Let’s put the question in a way that’s closer to home: if you and your partner were killed in a car crash, and the only close relatives who were able and willing to take the children on were your gay brother and his partner, would you prefer them to be adopted by them or by complete strangers, albeit a straight couple? And which alternative would be morally right and the best option for the children? What parents would not in fact prefer their children to be adopted by a devoted gay or lesbian couple in such circumstances – even a couple they did not know – if the alternative was their children having to live in care or an orphanage of some sort?

From the preceding discussion, one can conclude that Christians are entitled to take the view – and it follows logically from first principles – that adoption by gay couples is always wrong and that they want to have nothing to do with it. But equally, Christians can take the view that gay adoption is compatible with Christian teaching – not out of liberalism and a soft attitude towards homosexuality, but out of charity and compassion towards children. Clearly, on an orthodox Catholic or legalistic view of Christian moral teaching, the rejection of gay adoption prevails. But on a view that places the calling to love one another uppermost – even if this involves making compromises with the letter of the law – then it’s possible to see how Christian adoption agencies could in conscience agree to consider gay couples as potential adoptive parents, irrespective of whether the civil law mandates them or not to do so on the basis of egalitarian principles.

In the recent debate in the UK over the new legal equality provisions, the Catholic Church – speaking on behalf of Catholic adoption agencies – rightly placed the emphasis on the centrality of the needs of the children. Those agencies do in fact have a very good record of finding parents for some of the children that are the most difficult to place, owing to the traumas they may have been through. The Church’s view is that it is indeed in the best interests of the children to be found adoptive parents who are of the opposite sex to one another and, ideally, are married to one another. The agencies clearly put in a great deal of painstaking work to ensure they can find suitable parents of this sort for the children they have responsibility for. All the same, the Church accepts that there might be some children for whom adoption by single people – even, in theory, gay persons – can be the best option, if, for instance, the children have been abused by a parent of one particular gender. There is not such a huge leap from this to the view that in other instances, for similar reasons, it might even be the best option (considerations of moral relativism apart) for some children to be adopted by two parents of the same gender, rather than just one.

The only thing that stands in the way of this view being taken is the moral condemnation of gay sex and relationships: of gay sex rather than homosexuality per se (if adoption by single gay persons is morally acceptable) or extra-marital straight sex (if adoption by unmarried straight couples is acceptable). So there is really a sort of prejudice against gay persons going on, as the Catholic teaching that any sexual acts other than unprotected genital sex within marriage are sinful is being applied inconsistently. In fact, the Church is practising its own form of moral relativism, for exactly the same reason as I was advocating a sort of relativist argument in favour of adoption by gay couples. In other words, the Church itself accepts that sometimes the adoptive parents will fall short of the ideal of a stable, married, Christian couple. This is firstly because, in the real world, that moral and social ideal isn’t always the best option for the child (cf. the example of single adoptive parents being occasionally preferred), and secondly because there just aren’t enough couples that conform to the ideal who want to adopt.

Might it even be the case that individuals or couples who decide they’d like to adopt are more likely themselves to be psychologically wounded and, by that token, are perhaps less likely than the average of the population to be successful in maintaining life-long marriages? I’m not sure if there are any statistics on the comparative divorce and separation rates of couples who adopt and couples who don’t. In any case, if the divorce rate were higher among adopters, you could interpret this as just showing that adoption itself was stressful, or that it was linked to some adopters not being able to have children, which is a well known cause of marital break-up. One intriguing related question, though, is whether the break-up rates of gay couples who adopt are higher than those of straight adopters. It is of course far too early to research this question, as gay adoption and civil partnerships are such recent innovations. However, it is quite conceivable that gay partnerships (and possibly, in the future, marriages) will provide more stable parental relationships and families for their adopted children than the straight equivalents. This is partly because gay people grow up without the expectation that having children will just come easily and automatically to them: they will always have thought that they might have to adopt rather than having children of their own. This means that their adopted children (more so if the adopters have had to fight to be allowed to adopt) may be wanted even more than they would be by straight couples, for whom those children may always be seen as a substitute for children of their own, without denying the love that parents still feel for their adopted charges.

Which brings me back round to the issue of putting the needs of the children first. If the needs of the children really are paramount, should the fact that two potential adoptive parents of the same sex share a bed and do physical things to one another that the Church regards as immoral (as ‘more immoral’ than the physical acts performed by a stable unmarried straight couple) automatically take precedence over the perception that those same persons might actually be the best parents for this specific child? The best parents, that is, out of all the prospective parents on an agency’s books – we’re talking about practical morality here, not an ideal world. Just as the Catholic agencies have an excellent record for placing difficult children, so it is the case that it is often gay couples that take on those children, also frequently with highly positive outcomes for the children concerned. And maybe that’s partly because, as gay people have often had to struggle to overcome adversities in their personal lives, they are well placed to identify with children who have had a difficult start in life.

But is it giving children the best start in life to offer them not a mother and father but, say, two mothers or two fathers? In adoption, parents become not just the children’s nominal mothers and fathers but their real ones in law: with the same legal and social rights as the biological parents (if still alive) had before the adoption went through. The fact that it is legally permissible for same-sex couples to adopt creates, I think, a totally unique situation whereby it is possible for children to have two real – official – mothers or fathers. This is not the same, for instance, as when a child adopted by a male-female couple is said to have two ‘real’ mothers: their adoptive mother, who is the official parent in the eyes of the law and also hopefully becomes their real parent in emotional terms, and their biological mother – the real genetic parent. Nor is it the same as when a child has, say, a real (biological) father who might have left the mother and a real (emotional) father in the shape of a stepdad, in which case it is the biological father who remains the real (official) father in the eyes of the law; unless the child is adopted by the stepfather, in which case the parental rights rebound on to him.

In cases of same-sex adoption, by contrast, a child acquires two real (official) mothers or fathers who, one hopes, also become their real parents in emotional terms. In practice, if the child’s biological parents are both known and still alive at the time of the adoption, then it is a child’s ‘normal’ parental pairing of mother and father who are replaced in loco parentis by two mothers or two fathers. The child could be said to be losing a father, for instance, at the same time as gaining an extra mother in his place. It could be argued that this is a violation of a child’s ‘right to a father’, or their right to a mother if the situation were reversed. In any case, even without taking into consideration this ‘replacement’ of a conventional mother-father parental pairing by a mother-mother or father-father pairing, same-sex adoption could still be viewed as a denial of a child’s right to have both a mother and a father.

These are very difficult questions, psychologically and ethically. But in reality, children in same-sex adoptions are not being denied either a father or mother but are being offered the love of two new parents – who just happen to be of the same sex – to make up for the love of the child’s biological mother and father that, for whatever reason, is no longer available to them. So it’s not a subtraction of relationship, connection and love but an addition; and the law still accords recognition to the biological parents, and allows a relationship between the child and their biological parents to be (re-)established (by mutual consent) once that child has reached the age of maturity. So it’s only really if one holds the view that there is some sort of ideological conspiracy to undermine the conventional (straight) family and traditional morality that one would see same-sex adoption (negatively) as depriving a child of their right to a mother and father, rather than (positively) as just a gift of love and care to that child.

Nonetheless, the fact that a child adopted by a same-sex couple gains either two mothers or two fathers must have an impact in psychological terms. Given that this situation is quite unique and unprecedented, it is pre-judging things to assume that this impact must always or only be harmful, relative to a child’s having just one official father and mother. All the same, this issue should not be treated lightly or passed over as it has been, to some extent, in politically correct discussions on same-sex adoption. The truth is we don’t really know what the long-term impacts on children will be from having two legal mothers or fathers, rather than a mother and a father, or a single parent. There may be some negatives as well as positives. But despite the negatives, there is a need to remain focused on the – albeit relative – positive benefits one is seeking to achieve through same-sex adoption, which are basically identical to those from straight adoption: giving children love and the best start one can in the actual circumstances.

The fact that in same-sex adoption, a child has either two mothers or fathers raises an interesting dilemma in terms of how the Church can actually refer to such parents. The core of the Church’s moral issue with same-sex adoption is that it violates the created order whereby children naturally have – and are intended by God to have – one mother and one father. Hence, the objections to same-sex adoption are not just on practical and psychological grounds (in which case, the arguments I have been advancing might carry more weight) but on spiritual grounds. Ultimately, adoption is seen by the Church as having a redemptive purpose, which is the core reason why the Church sees it as part of its mission to be involved in adoption in the first place. That purpose could perhaps be defined as being to lead the life of a vulnerable child back into the divine order for the family, society and nature as expressed in the unity, love and mutual responsibilities that bind the trio of father, mother and child(ren). It is hoped that when an adopted child, who might otherwise have been alone in this world, is re-embraced within this natural unity of the family, the consequence is that that child will be more likely to encounter Christ (the very name and spirit of that unity and love) and reflect the pattern of his will and purpose in their subsequent life.

Outside of this, in some ways, commendably idealistic picture of the family, it is, however, rather difficult for the Church to know how it should actually ‘relate to’ same-sex adoptive parents, both conceptually / terminologically and pastorally. Is it the case that the Church (particularly, the Catholic Church) must necessarily regard same-sex adoption and parenthood – because it violates the order of creation – as not just morally wrong but invalid, in the same way that it considers same-sex marriages to be invalid? Legally, the Church is obliged to accept same-sex adoption as a fact if the civil law of a country permits it. But there are, for instance, many legal forms of marriage that the Church does not accept as really valid: in spirit as opposed to the letter of the law. In the same way, is the Church’s position effectively that same-sex adoptive parents are more like carers or guardians rather than real parents in spirit? In the terms of the above discussion, the Church might accept that same-sex parents were a child’s official parents but not necessarily the child’s real parents (who remain the child’s biological parents?). And does the Church make a distinction – whether in practice or in doctrine – between the ontological status of male-female adoptive parents and that of same-sex parents? In other words, does the Church view the former as becoming the child’s true parents (in spirit as well as in law, though not biologically), whereas it regards it as impossible for same-sex parents to be a child’s spiritual parents (the true parents, called by God to fulfil that role)?

I have to say that I don’t actually know the answer to these questions: the limited amount of web research I’ve been able to do hasn’t turned up any formal statement of Catholic teaching on the matter. Maybe the Church doesn’t actually have an established position on the ontological and spiritual status of adoptive parents, as opposed to the moral responsibilities of those parents and the Church’s own duties of pastoral care towards them, whether they be male-female or same-sex. The absence of any definitive statement in this area could then be seen as analogous to the Church’s unwillingness to declare whether a civil marriage involving two non-Catholics is a valid marriage: it’s something beyond the Church’s remit to make dogmatic, and therefore universally binding, pronouncements about – whereas the Church does of course believe itself to be qualified to issue dogmatic statements about the behaviour of its own members. Adoption is a civil matter and is therefore not something the Church has any direct control over, in terms either of its practice or its meaning.

In reality, however, it is clear that the Church does treat Catholic male-female adoptive parents as if they were both the real (biological) parents, and the true (spiritual) parents, i.e. as called by God to exercise all the rights and duties of parents in relation to their adopted children. The same cannot be said about Catholic same-sex adoptive parents. In October 2006, for example, the Catholic Bishops of the USA voted on a resolution that referred to the baptism of children adopted by gay couples as a matter for “pastoral concern”. The resolution stated that this sacrament should be accorded to those children only if there was a reasonable hope that they would be brought up in the Catholic religion. This can mean only one thing: that the gay couples involved would be expected to be celibate, as that would be the only way in which their lives together would be in conformity with Catholic teaching and hence give rise to the hope that the children would receive a consistently applied example of the Catholic way of life as they grew up.

But then this really would amount to no more than adoption by, effectively, single gay persons – the only difference being that there are two of them, living and caring for the child(ren) together – rather than by couples. To me, this picture of the celibate same-sex adoptive family appears to embody less unity and mutual commitment than one in which the parents have a sexual relationship with one another. This is partly because the idea of the parents acting together as true parents – plural – seems remote if they are not also united with one another in an intimate physical and emotional way as the parental couple. In fact, a celibate arrangement like this would make the adopted child’s new family home resemble a sort of lay religious community: celibate Christian persons of the same gender caring for children separated from their biological parents as part of their Christian calling. Putting it from the child’s perspective, does it not create a much more loving, normal and healthy family environment if they can relate to their parents as bound together in a single unit, within which they in turn are embraced? Admittedly, with same-sex parents, this would not be ‘mum and dad’. But in order for an adopted child to see their parents as real mums or real dads, don’t they need to be a ‘conjugal’ unit, rather than separate individuals that would in practice merely be exercising the role of substitute mums or dads? Separating the same-sex parents in this way would have a similar effect on a child as if male-female parents were expected to act as separate individuals in their parental care towards a child: not really combined into a single loving parental unit, thereby giving the child the security that its parents’ love is really capable of binding and holding the family together through indissoluble ties.

So it’s hard to see how celibate same-sex adoptive parents could be true parents, emotionally and spiritually. And that is my point: the Church does not and will not see same-sex parents as true parents in any sense – in fact, at least, if not in formal doctrine. So one could say that, for the Church, the fact that celibacy would be more likely to result in same-sex adopters being less authentic and emotionally real as parents does not represent an impairment of their parenthood because they are not really parents in the first place.

In a sense, one could argue that this basically celibate + non-parental ideal for the relationship of same-sex adoptive parents to their children implicitly acknowledges the fact that sexually active same-sex parents would be more like real parents: more like the straight equivalent, that is. And indeed, there is a critical ambiguity in the language the Church uses to describe gay partnerships. These are referred to – if only in the negative – as ‘unions’. For example, a 2003 statement on the issue from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared: “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law”. This phrase can be interpreted as having two possible implications: 1) ‘gay “unions” are not only morally wrong but do not really exist, because only a true marriage between a man and a woman can constitute a sexual union as such’; 2) ‘there is such a thing as a gay union, e.g. a sexual relationship between two persons of the same sex; but this (or just the active sexual expression of the attraction?) is morally wrong’.

In the first sense above, gay sex cannot constitute a union because only in the marriage of a husband and wife can the physical act become the expression and manifestation of a true, spiritual union. In the second sense, a contrary meaning is implied: it is the sex that actually defines a ‘union’ between two gay persons. Despite what is explicitly stated, this concept of a gay union is in fact based on an analogy with Christian doctrine on marriage, whereby in order to be valid (and hence to be a union), a marriage has to be consummated. At the same time, there is a circularity here: the dual interpretation that is given to gay sex (both a union and not a union) allows the validity of, and any possibility of moral good within, gay unions defined purely in relation to sexual activity to be denied.

But if you don’t define a gay relationship simply in relation to sex, this enables one to come up with an alternative Christian concept of gay union. It is not the sex but the love between the sexual partners that makes that partnership a union, as it is this love and mutual commitment that elevates the relationship above the level of ‘mere sex’: sexual gratification without any reference to either love or the intention to have children. If the place of ‘union’ in gay partnerships is seen as the relationship of love, rather than the sex, then the sex itself can be seen as just one (albeit particularly intense and meaningful) expression of that love among others; but not as in itself essential to constituting and maintaining the relationship as a loving union – although in practice, love between members of a couple tends to need some sort of physical expression to be nourished.

One of the characteristics of this sort of loving union between sexual partners – married or unmarried, gay or straight – is the wish for children. This is not always present, of course; nor can one talk strictly of an intention (as opposed to a wish) to have children being inherent to the sexual act or instinct, in the gay context. But the wish to take on the responsibilities and duties of parents, on the part of gay couples, could be interpreted as something that helps to identify their relationship as a ‘true union’ analogous to the marital union; and as expressing the same fundamental human need for the sexual relationship to be fulfilled and expanded beyond itself to encompass the joys and trials of mutual parenthood. It is only if one is fixated on defining gay relationships purely in relation to forms of sex that cannot naturally result in parenthood that one can write off these feelings and wishes as contrary to nature and to God’s plan.

If, on the other hand, it is love that defines a union (as it is the love of God that consecrates the sacrament of marriage), then it is, so to speak, only natural that gay people, too, should wish to become parents together. In fact, one might say that this wish is a mark of the authentically spiritual character of the love that a gay couple shares. And not only that, but one could even talk of the desire and the fact of gay couples taking on the responsibility for children through adoption as having a redemptive purpose, just like that of having children naturally as part of a marriage: it elevates sexuality beyond itself to become part of a mission to give life and love to children.

Of course, gay adoptive parents do not give life to their children in the biological sense. But it is only if one has a biology-based concept of parenthood that one would say that this disqualifies gay couples from being parents (givers of live and love to children) in the true, spiritual sense. And that biology-centric concept of parenthood does seem to be at the root of Christian refusal of same-sex adoption and parenthood: that because gay sex can’t naturally (biologically) result in children, then it can’t be natural (part of the divine order for the human spirit and nature) for gay persons to wish to extend to children the love they feel for each other that is expressed, in part, through sex. But maybe this can legitimately be seen as part of God’s plan: bringing together gay couples that want to transcend a self-indulgent, irresponsible sexual lifestyle by giving love to children who might otherwise go through their whole childhood without the love and devotion of parents and a family.

As this last discussion shows, any support for arguments in favour of same-sex adoption – even if practised with extreme care to ensure that the parents concerned are as well matched as possible to specific children’s needs and circumstances – does involve a certain amount of dissent from official Catholic doctrine. But this dissent is not motivated by some sort of spirit of disobedience, although I guess the reasoning could be dismissed as being disordered in the same way as gay sex itself. My concern is that there may be kids out there whose desperate need for adoptive parents could be met – albeit imperfectly – by gay couples; indeed, maybe it is part of ‘God’s plan’ to bring the needs and wishes of the prospective adopters and of those children together.

It’s not enough for Catholic adoption agencies to effectively wash their hands of the issue and pass on applications for adoption from gay couples to other agencies, as has been the practice up to now. You could say that this was a case of moral ‘bad faith’: denying moral responsibility for something that is not directly the result of one’s actions but which is still facilitated by them. The denial could be stated as follows: ‘we’re not responsible for promoting adoption by same-sex couples, who we refer to other agencies’. And yet, by so doing, Catholic agencies are indirectly enabling same-sex adoption and, effectively, condoning it. Would it not be more honest for Catholic agencies to in fact seriously consider applications from same-sex couples? Then if, in all conscience, the agencies still came to the conclusion that there were no children on their books that would benefit by being adopted by those couples, then yes, no moral reproach (as opposed to legal complaint) could be made if the agencies declined the application and the couples were referred elsewhere. Then at least, the Catholic agencies would have given an active ‘no’ to the application rather than a passive ‘yes, maybe’. Perhaps only in this way can Catholic agencies be said to be truly exercising their duty of care to protect children who may be adopted by same-sex couples, rather than effectively passing on this responsibility to other agencies who may not have the same moral standards or values.

Clearly, it could be pointed out that this might be a rather redundant process: why go through the motions of processing applications that are automatically going to be rejected? There would obviously be no point in that, and that’s not what I’m advocating. I’m suggesting that agencies should take a long, sincere look at the gay individuals and couples that approach them (even supposing that any gay people do apply to them), and really examine their consciences and professional judgements as to whether there are any children under their care who would prosper if adopted by those applicants.

This would ultimately, perhaps, involve trying to listen to the voice of the Spirit and putting one’s trust in the truth that God’s love can work through situations where its presence is not usually suspected – even in the love of a gay couple for a child.

The Amoral Market and the Randomness Of Reward: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Seven)

2007-02-23T04:01:00.000Z

The TV show ‘Big Brother’ is a competition: “only a gameshow”, as the contestants of the first ever, non-celebrity version of the programme chanted out at one point. But as such, it is a metaphor for contemporary British society – reality TV.

In the second of this blog series on ‘Britology’ (the cultural project to define and unite around ‘British values’), on 3 December, I listed one of the most important contemporary British values as ‘free competition (of ideas, individuals, businesses, economies)’. This is the form that freedom takes in modern Britain: not the high-minded Enlightenment concept of Liberty (although it is a practical development of it), nor the Christian idea of moral freedom. It is essentially what happens to freedom when the model for society as a whole is the market. Freedom becomes the right to compete fully in the market place, as it provides the fundamental condition for the market place to be genuinely a market: one where goods and services are allowed to find their true ‘value’ based on the principles of supply and demand – the matching of our desires with the conditions for their realisation.

This is not to say that freedom in the pure meanings defined above is not also thought to be an essential British value. But, strictly speaking, freedom is not a value in itself: it is the very condition for objects, desires and actions to be of value to us, and to be perceived as good or bad, because then they are things that we have chosen. Cultures endow freedom with their own meanings and ‘purpose’: freedom is the possibility of choosing and embracing something that a given culture or society holds dear. In modern Britain, the exercise of ‘choice’ has become associated more with consumer choices (choice as a fundamental condition and characteristic of the market-society), rather than with informed moral choice, or even with choosing a form of society on the basis of some notion of the collective good or other ideological belief.

In this context, in contemporary British culture, the value or merit of ideas, individuals or physical objects is increasingly not perceived to be intrinsic (related to their moral status, beauty or ability to serve real human needs, for instance) but depends on their desirability and marketability: their ability to appeal to our free choices, to compete successfully in the market (to ‘participate fully in society’), thereby vindicating the efficacy of the free market itself to deliver what we want (to ‘realise our aspirations’). This model for society admits of an egalitarian dimension when it is allied to the goal of bringing about the inclusion of previously marginalised and disadvantaged groups, such as gays and lesbians, ethnic minorities and disabled persons. In the society-as-market paradigm, the condition of these groups is transformed when they are ‘freed’ – enabled – to participate in the market as fully as any other groups or individuals: trading themselves and ‘what they have to offer’ in exchange for society’s recognition that this has a value.

But there is an amorality and randomness about all this: the value of something becomes equated with the extent to which we want to have, do or be it; and the principal criterion by which we judge the merits of a person or action is by how they are rewarded, or not, with market / social acceptance = economic success. The reason why ‘celebrity culture’ has taken off in the way it has is because celebrity (popularity and commercial success, fame and fortune) has acquired pseudo-intrinsic value as a symbol of the power of the market to realise the dreams of nobodies (people of no value) and turn them into somebodies (valuable commodities).

Big Brother is in this sense a microcosm of modern Britain. It is a show that specialises in taking nobodies and turning them into instant celebrities and valuable commodities simply by exposing them to a mass-market audience and a democratic (and highly lucrative) popular vote: less of a mirror to society than a metaphor of our society as shop window. It is no accident, in Blair’s Britain, that Big Brother’s success in endowing supposedly ordinary individuals with enhanced social-market value has been such an influential egalitarian fast-tracker, helping to bring a whole variety of previously ‘undervalued’ groups into the socio-economic mainstream through the democratic acceptance their symbolic representatives have attained through the show. Gays, lesbians, women, transsexuals, racial minorities, disabled people and, yes, even Christians have either won Big Brother or done extremely well in it – expressing the social will that these previously discriminated groups should be allowed to enjoy the rewards of the market-society as fully as any other sections of it.

If the value of individuals, lifestyles and social groups is measured in terms of their right and ability to participate on level terms in the social market, what this means is that the morality of those individuals and lifestyles becomes secondary to their socio-economic value (their ‘contribution to society’). Moral choices become a series of ‘lifestyle options’, and the moral good is equated with what is ‘good for society’: with whatever contributes to greater social inclusion; greater participation in the free (and liberating) market; and the encompassing of ever more aspects of life within the market, resulting in their legitimisation. Ultimately, this leads to a sort of moral neutrality or equivalence: the moral good converges with the concept of equality, such that the good is no longer a factor of differentiation (setting apart right from wrong), but, on the contrary, the good is whatever contributes to the greatest lack of ethical discrimination between ‘competing’ choices and lifestyles. In this context, the ‘common good’ (associated with the idea that that there are certain actions and choices that can be of benefit to the whole or greater part of the community and of society) is replaced by a belief that all individuals and choices are of equal value (equivalent, ‘equally valid’, as good as one another). Instead of the qualitative idea of the common good, we have a quantitative notion of the ‘best’, which is whichever lifestyle, product or individual is most successful in the social market – whichever becomes the most widely adopted and most commonly accepted (common goods, indeed). The reversal of traditional morality is completed when it is the centres of resistance to this commercialisation and equalisation of values – such as the Catholic Church, nationalism and Islam – that are vilified and morally condemned.

The recent row over gay adoption was a case in point. One of the most interesting – and least commented – aspects of the controversy was the way adoption was framed as a sort of commercial service offered by adoption agencies to would-be parents. The whole context of the discussion was the sexual orientation regulations in the forthcoming Equality Bill, which set out the bases for ensuring equal access to goods and services irrespective of sexual orientation. But is adoption a commercial service in this way? If that is the case, then adopted children become a sort of product that gay couples are allowed to purchase on the free market on equal terms with straight couples, married or not; and adoption agencies’ ‘services’ are offered to the parents, not the children, and consist essentially of matching children with suitable parents in rather a similar way to the pairing of individuals carried out by dating agencies or the matching of potential employees to vacant positions provided by recruitment agencies.

But this is not really what adoption is all about: it should be a service of love towards the children, whereby the agencies are dedicated to finding parents who in turn will serve the children with their life-long love and support. Beneath all the rhetoric and position taking on both sides of the debate, the issue was very much one of a conflict between a traditional Christian ethic focused on the needs of the children and the demand of the market society for an equal supply of children to fulfil the desires of all would-be parents, irrespective of their lifestyle choices. This in part accounts for the fact that the perspective of the needs of the children was relatively absent from the arguments of the pro-gay adoption side: these needs were secondary to the demand for equal ‘rights’ to access adoption services – the rights of adopters being implicitly prioritised over what is right for the children. Maybe also, as most of the people defending the cause of equality for gay people in this area were straight, there was an element of not wanting to delve too deeply into the question of the needs of the children; as the majority of straight people perhaps secretly feel that adoption by a stable heterosexual couple is in fact the best option for children, despite the social market-equality agenda.

The row over the supposed racist bullying of Celebrity Big Brother (CBB) participant Shilpa Shetty by Jade Goody and other contestants was another example of a clash between the Big Brother model of social-market equality and more traditional ideas of cultural separation. I’ve written about the CBB controversy in previous blog entries. In brief, Shilpa was not a victim of racism but of a sort of jealousy and bitchiness that is capable of being read, to some extent, as representative of a not uncommon English-nationalist resentment and resistance towards people of other nationalities and races taking advantage of the British free market-society and competing successfully within it, to the apparent detriment of those who were born here. In the discussions on the show, Shilpa was clearly seen as a representative of the ideals of social-market integration: that people of all nations and races should be allowed to compete freely, equally and fairly in British society and its cultural-economic extension – the global market. But Jade Goody’s behaviour – for all its aggression and crudeness – could be seen as the expression of a wish for England to be for the English and India to be for the Indians: a defence of separate, distinctive national-cultural identities. This is not just jingoistic and racist: the wish to maintain differences between cultures can, on the contrary, be seen as proceeding from a concern to hold on to things that are precious and distinctive about one’s country and background, and not for everything to be absorbed into the globalised free market in which all cultures are equally valid to one’s own, and have an equal right to exist in – and compete against – one’s own culture.

Similarly, Shilpa Shetty’s own aspiration to compete and achieve success in a Western market (symbolised and actualised by her participation in CBB) could be seen as symptomatic of how the success of ethnic Indians and of the nation of India in the global economy is actually contributing to a loss of distinctive aspects of Indian culture, rather than being an affirmation of them. Shilpa Shetty – the Bollywood star – was not setting out to bring Bollywood to a mass market in the West, but rather to leave behind her Indian background and to forge a career in Western films and TV: on Western terms. This is perhaps one of the meanings of Jade’s suggestion to Shilpa that she should go and visit some of the slums in her country: not so much an insult to India as a poor and backward country, but an implication that Shilpa was so concerned to make a career for herself on the global market that she was indifferent to the continuing hardships faced by the people – Indian filmgoers – who’d given her the opportunity in the first place. In this context, Shilpa could be seen as representative of an individualistic, free-market-competitive notion of equality superseding a true concern for social equality, opportunity and solidarity on a more collective level.

Shilpa Shetty was a convenient symbol of ‘pure’ racism, uncomplicated by other factors that might have made the unpleasant language directed towards her more recognisable: appearing to have more in common with generally held opinions and ordinary behaviour. Ethnic Indians constitute one of the most successfully integrated racial minorities in British society, and this is what made it easy to view Shilpa’s treatment as simply racist: motivated by prejudice, ignorance and race hate rather than by broader socio-economic and cultural factors. But if a Polish or Lithuanian immigrant had taken Shilpa’s place and received the same treatment, would it have been possible to present it as racist? If so, then all the many people up and down the land who resent the way in which low-paid jobs have been given to Central and Eastern European immigrants – pushing down wages and, so the argument goes, reducing opportunities for British people – are also merely racist and bigoted. And how different the arguments would have been if Shilpa were a burka- and niqab-wearing Asian Muslim! Then her victimisation could not have been described as racist, not only because it would have been more obvious that it was more accurately viewed as the expression of socio-cultural insecurity and defensiveness; but also because many of those decrying the ‘bullying’ of Shilpa Shetty would actually agree with at least the ‘philosophical’ basis for strong suspicion of the Muslim veil, if not the overtly aggressive expression of that hostility that might have been provided by Jade Goody! After all, what does the veil symbolise? One of the things it symbolises – at least from the point of view of Western onlookers – is the resistance of orthodox Islam to the Western market-society in which all have a right – indeed, a natural inclination – to trade themselves, their goods and services freely, openly and equally: women as much as men. And this resistance of course has a spiritual and moral foundation: ethical differentiation between right and wrong lifestyles, and between the expected roles and behaviour of men and women, versus the social-market-egalitarian view that all have a right – and therefore, it is right – to lead a full, independent and active socio-economic existence.

In this context, it was highly invidious when – in a speech on multiculturalism at the end of January 2007 – the UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron compared Muslim ‘extremists’ with members of the hard-right British National Party (BNP). Not many commentators seem to have pointed out how conceptually screwball and insulting towards Muslims this comparison is. Islam is one of the bugbears of the BNP, and the party’s supporters in its strongholds have been linked with campaigns designed to fuel prejudice and even violence against Muslim communities. It’s about as accurate as equating Nazis with Communists: OK, their actions might have been similar but not their philosophical justification. This is no better than when President Bush condemned ‘Islamists’ as ‘Islamic fascists’. It’s an example of just how prejudiced and extreme in its turn is the tendency for moral equalisation inherent within the social-market-egalitarian point of view. Just as any lifestyle and form of economic activity that promotes a dynamic free market is capable of being seen as ‘good’, anything that opposes the amoral, global market is seen as ‘evil’; and therefore, fascists and ‘Islamists’ are somehow equivalent.

The problem is the definition of what is an ‘extremist’, and Mr Cameron’s view appears to be that anyone who is in favour of the introduction of Shariah law is an extremist. Promoting such a thing through violence and insurrection could certainly qualify for the epithet of ‘extremist’; but holding Shariah law as an ideal for the whole of society is probably something that the majority of Muslims around the world regard as integral to their faith. So is it a form of extremism merely to be a devout, committed Muslim who attempts to structure his or her daily life around the dictates of Shariah; and who regards the commitment to Islam as fundamentally more important, morally and ontologically, than any commitment to a secular state and to the material benefits of economic life? The ‘racist’ (BNP) and the ‘Islamist extremist’ are facile categories with which anyone who resists the desired unification of Britain around an optimised and globalised free market-society can be readily assimilated. The views that are stigmatised in this way can then be condemned as promoting social division rather than merely standing for a different society and way of life than the competitive free market-society into which the unifiers would have us all fully engaged: to be different and separate from the market society is therefore simply equated with divisiveness.

There is perhaps no more compelling symbol of the way the British political establishment is wedded to the idea that market forces are inherently good, and can always be channelled to serve the cause of economic regeneration and social inclusion, than the government’s enthusiasm to allow the development of so-called ‘super-casinos’: Las Vegas-style ‘gaming’ (=gambling) complexes. On announcing recently that the first of these casinos was to be built in a deprived area of the city of Manchester, the government attempted to justify this choice on the basis that the new gambling venue would bring employment and regeneration to a place where it was desperately needed. But no consideration was given to the broader harm to individuals and society as a whole that will inevitably come from more people being drawn into gambling addiction by the lure of such places. Instead, the emphasis was placed on gambling being just another form of entertainment choice, which consumers (gamblers) were entitled to have the opportunity to make or not to make.

In this way, gambling stands as another metaphor for the way in which the amoral market, and the random nature of success or failure in it, has come to replace traditional moral judgements of right and wrong, and of reward being linked to true merit (as opposed to success being viewed as meretricious in its own right). There are winners and losers in the lottery of the market society – but that’s just life, isn’t it? You pays your money and takes your choice. Just as gay couples, so the argument goes, have the right to choose – and it is right that they can choose – whether to spend their money on adopting children. Just as paying TV viewer / voters have the right to choose / it is right that they did choose to support an Indian Bollywood star who was trading on her sex appeal as the innocent victim of racism; rather than choosing a more random celebrity – Jade Goody – on whom those same viewers could vent their envy of the coveted fame and fortune they’d not been able to achieve. Just as senior politicians have the right to – it is right that they should – brand Muslim traditionalists as extremists because they resist the encroachment of the market into every aspect of life; thereby adding fuel to the fire of British-nationalist Islamophobia, and then adding insult to injury by comparing Islamic supporters of Shariah to their very enemies in the BNP.

After all, we live in a free society in Britain, don’t we? And the purpose of freedom is to create a competitive, dynamic market society, in which all individuals, goods and services can realise their true value. But this freedom isn’t made available so that ‘extremists’ can abuse it – in the name of so-called ‘free speech’ – by daring to question its morality and socio-cultural consequences. So cultural conservative, Catholic traditionalist or devout Muslim beware. Speak out, criticise the morality of the global market ideal at your peril. Because in Britain, Big Brother is watching you.

Christian Versus Gay Rights Row: What’s Ultimately At Stake is the Credibility Of the Church’s Teaching

2007-01-25T21:36:00.000Z

In the previous two blogs, I’ve explored some of the underlying reasons why the Church – the Catholic Church in particular – has taken the stance it has over the sexual orientation regulations in the soon-to-be-passed Equality Bill. The Catholic Church has claimed that one of the consequences of the bill would be that it would be forced to close down its adoption agencies, as these agencies would otherwise be obliged to seek to place children for adoption by gay couples, which would go against its teaching on marriage and the family.

Up to now, I’ve actually failed to see why it was said that those agencies’ current practice of placing children only with (straight) married couples or, in exceptional circumstances, with single persons would be construed as discriminatory towards gay persons on grounds of sexual orientation. This is because it’s not a case of rejecting gay people because they’re gay but because they aren’t married; and that the Church’s view is a) that it is in the best interests of the children that they should be brought up by a father and a mother who are married to one another, and that b) sexually active gay relationships are morally wrong and therefore children shouldn’t be brought up in such a context. So it isn’t on grounds of sexual orientation that gay people are being rejected but on grounds of the suitability of their lifestyle and home life.

For this reason, I came to the conclusion that the Church’s public position was to some extent tactical. In the first of the previous two blogs, I described it as a tactic to pre-empt the consequences of gay marriage being made legal. An exemption to the sexual orientation regulations obtained now would later enable Catholic adoption agencies to continue to select straight married adoptive parents rather than gay married ones without this being viewed in law as discrimination. In the second blog, I considered the perspective that the Church wished to establish its right to continue to preach that gay sex is wrong and that on occasions (e.g. in the case of adoption) this justifies preferential treatment being given to straight people over gay people. The moral condemnation of homosexuality these rights rest upon nonetheless risks appearing both unjust (potentially violating even the Church’s own teachings about homosexuality), and discriminatory in both the ordinary sense of the word and as defined by the new regulations.

All the same, it seemed to me that the Church would have a very strong legal defence if ever a complaint about alleged discrimination towards a gay couple seeking to adopt a child were brought to court. Firstly, the Church could argue that they were not discriminating between straight and gay people as such, but between married and unmarried couples. Even if gay marriage were introduced, the Church could still seek to uphold this distinction on the basis of its understanding of marriage and its belief that gay marriage is invalid. Secondly, the Church could maintain that it was not discriminating against gay couples on grounds of sexual orientation but on the basis of a couple’s behaviour and relationship situation, i.e. that they were sexually active in a way considered immoral by the Church.

Having now had an opportunity to look at the regulations – at least, as they have already gone into law in Northern Ireland – it seems to me that the Church would in fact find it difficult to make out a defence based on a distinction between discriminating against unmarried persons and against gay persons. (See clause 3 (b) (i), which could be applied to the use of marriage to disqualify gay people from accessing a service: unfair because marriage isn’t open to them.)

What of the distinction between denying the provision of a service to someone because they are gay (‘on grounds of sexual orientation’, as the Bill puts it: discrimination under the terms of the law) and denying it because of their gay sexual activity. There is a logical, ethical distinction to be made between these two things, and the Church’s teaching makes this distinction. In essence, that teaching could be stated as follows: one cannot condemn someone for being gay (i.e. having an inherent predisposition or tendency to act in a particular way), which is not dependent on a personal choice. But one can condemn someone for committing acts of immorality under an impulsion proceeding from that predisposition, which is dependent on choice.

If the Church is confident about the validity of this distinction, and the support it could give to a defence against accusations of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, why does it appear so reluctant to put the distinction to the test in a legal case that might arise from the new law? Rather, it seems willing to just fold over and let its adoption agencies close.

It seems to me that there are two reasons why this could be. First, any such scrutiny might reveal that in practice the Church’s own treatment of homosexuals often appears to be based more on repudiation of their sexual orientation as such than of their behaviour and lifestyles. For instance, the Church appears unwilling to consider any gay person as a potential adoptive parent. This could include even a single gay person dedicated to a celibate life. This stance could easily be adjudged to be discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation as opposed to sexual lifestyle. This perhaps reflects a toughening of the Church’s position on homosexuality in general under the present Pope. An example of this is that it has become more likely to be an impediment to any aspirations to becoming a priest if you openly admitted you were gay, even if you were completely committed to a celibate life.

Second, and more fundamentally, if the Church is often in practice not capable of applying the distinction between sexual orientation and sexual lifestyle even in its dealings with its own members, this makes it more difficult to uphold the validity of that distinction in doctrine. Whereas it is possible to elucidate that distinction in great detail and clarity in theological exposition, it is more difficult to validate it in the more ordinary parlance required to explain it in a secular courtroom. At a human, emotional level, it is rather hard to relate to the idea that someone can be condemned for their sexual desires and actions but not for that aspect of their personality and nature (their sexual orientation) of which those desires and actions are an expression. If the Church suddenly found itself in the dock of a criminal court, would the cold, rational explanations of theology suddenly appear as just that: inhuman, unfeeling and lacking in empathy towards real flesh and blood human beings?

The Church appears to have decided not to risk such a situation and the possibility that it could undermine the credibility of both its moral teaching and human compassion with regard to homosexuality. But if this is the case, it is a great shame. Because, ultimately, the Church’s teaching does not rest upon cold logic but on the calling to a love that is greater, more joyful and more human even than that which can be experienced through any form of sexual expression – gay or straight.

Discrimination In Moral Judgements: Further On the Gay Rights Versus Christian Morality Issue

2007-01-25T07:17:00.000Z

There is a more challenging interpretation than the one I put forward in yesterday’s blog for Christian calls for the right of churches, Christian organisations and individual believers to deny the provision of particular kinds of ‘service’ to gay individuals or couples – based on a moral judgement about their lifestyle – to be given legal protection in the Equality Bill due to be passed into UK law in April of this year. This is that the churches are concerned to ensure that they can still legally refer to active gay sexuality as being morally wrong in itself, and that this judgement can then provide sufficient justification in legal terms for services such as the provision of a double bed in a guesthouse or the processing of applications to become adoptive parents to be denied to gay couples. In other words, it might in fact be that the need to justify such a denial of service to gay couples on the basis that they are gay – rather than, merely, that they are not married – is an intrinsic requirement on the part of the churches, rather than just a tactic to ensure that services of this sort could still be denied to gay couples if gay marriage were introduced.

In short, the churches wish to protect their right to express and act upon a belief that there is something specially and uniquely immoral about gay sexual acts on top of the fact that they are a form of unmarried sex: that gay sex is more immoral than extra-marital straight sex. This would in part account for the fact that, in the examples of dilemmas of conscience that might arise under the new legislation, only the denial of a hotel room or adoption services to gay couples was emphasised, not the fact that on principle the same services ought to be withheld (and, in the case of Catholic adoption agencies, are withheld) from unmarried straight couples.

The Bill is about equality, and the judgement that gay sex is a graver sin than unmarried straight sex could be interpreted as an example of inequality: of unfair discrimination in moral judgements. The churches are essentially demanding the right to continue to condemn gay sex in stronger terms than unmarried straight sex but do not consider this to be a case of inequality but of truth. In other words, they are resisting a possible effect of the Bill: not just that sexually active gay persons have equal legal rights to straight persons, but that gay sex itself is more or less explicitly and officially acknowledged as morally equivalent to straight sex / marriage, i.e. no better and certainly no worse than straight sexual relationships – equal.

The churches should be more upfront about these implicit assumptions underlying their position. Are they in fact taking the view that gay sex is more immoral than straight sex in almost all its forms, apart from adultery and child abuse, for instance? There is little doubt that the Catholic Church’s official doctrine is that gay sex is a more serious deviation than extra-marital straight sex from what it considers to be the only legitimate form of sexual expression: unprotected genital sex within (straight) marriage. The Church of England’s position is more ambiguous, both doctrinally and in practice owing to the large number of more or less openly active gay clerics in its ranks.

This latter fact suggests a possible test that could be implemented in law to assess whether the refusal to provide a particular service to a gay couple was made on the basis of a genuine conviction that it would be morally wrong to do so, and therefore could merit the award of an exemption. The sincerity of the organisation’s moral stance could be measured by the degree of consistency with which it applied the same criteria to its own ‘personnel-selection’ procedures. In the case of the Catholic Church, it would be evident that being a sexually active gay man would pretty much disqualify you from applying to become a priest, unless of course you succeeded in keeping that part of your life under cover. Therefore, the unwillingness of Catholic adoption agencies to process applications from gay couples could be deemed to be a genuine expression of the Church’s moral convictions, applied to itself as much as to others. Whereas, in the case of the Church of England, it could be argued that it would be inconsistent for an agency to make out a case that their refusal of service was genuinely based on the Church’s teachings if in fact those teachings were not upheld systematically within the organisation of the Church to which that agency was affiliated.

If this is indeed the basis for the churches’ concerns about the Bill, then they should have the courage and honesty to admit and articulate it openly, i.e. that they believe gay sex to be morally wrong and that this conviction on occasions requires straight and gay people to be treated differently: discrimination on the grounds not of sexuality but of morality.

But there is clearly a danger for the churches in being more open about this. Firstly, they run the risk of alienating what is perhaps now the majority in our society that does not share the view that gay sex is any more immoral than straight sex. And this would also involve alienating many in the churches’ own ranks – gay or straight – who are more accepting of homosexuality.

The more serious risk is that this moral position would appear to be discriminatory in the other sense: that the doctrine could be seen as being intrinsically unfair, and could also be seen as being applied inconsistently in a manner that reveals homophobic prejudice. For example, it could legitimately be asked why the Church believes any kind of sexually active gay relationship is always worse than straight sexual practices. For instance, isn’t a loving, committed gay partnership (one that could provide a secure family for an adopted child, in some cases) morally better than a loveless, promiscuous straight sexual lifestyle? The Church had better have some logically (and organisationally) consistent and compassionate answers to such questions if their position is to have any credibility.

Furthermore, it would need to be made clear that the churches’ teachings are that it’s the behaviour and lifestyle of gay individuals and couples (active sexuality) that it rejects on moral terms (leading to the denial of adoption services, for instance) not the fact of those individuals being gay. This is both because that is what the official doctrine states but also because this differentiates actions taken on the basis of that conviction from discrimination. Discrimination involves denying rights to a person based on some aspect of their identity, i.e. in this case, because they are gay. Refusing to accept someone as a candidate to become an adoptive parent cannot therefore be for this reason, which is discriminatory in fact not just in law under the proposed new legislation. Therefore, the denial of service can only be because of a person’s or couple’s behaviour and relationship situation (that they’re sexually active), not because they are gay. Those church organisations or individual believers who do take a moral stand and risk prosecution under the new law had better be sure that their actions are motivated by rejection of the sin not of the sinner: based on moral condemnation of gay sex and not prejudice towards gay persons in themselves.

Is It Discrimination To Reject Gay Couples As Adopting Parents?

2007-01-24T10:35:00.000Z

I’ve felt I’ve been missing something in the row that’s erupted over Catholic, and today Anglican, protests over the supposed fact that the Equality Bill – due to be passed into UK law in April of this year – would require Christian adoption agencies to accept gay couples as potential candidates to adopt a child. I’ve been unable to understand why this was thought to be the case, assuming that a sensible compromise would in practice be implemented, whereby local authorities would just not refer gay couples to Catholic agencies that they worked with in order to pre-empt any conflict of conscience from arising.

If a gay couple for some reason decided to approach a Catholic agency of their own volition, then the agency – after the law has come into effect just as before – is under no obligation to take anyone on if they don’t think they are suitable parents. If the reason that is given for a couple’s unsuitability is that they’re gay, then this would potentially come into conflict with the new law, as far as I can see. But why can’t the reason be given that it’s because the couple are unmarried, and that the Church believes it’s in the best interest for children to be brought up by parents in a stable marriage, an institution which in its view is limited to unions between a man and a woman?

I checked the website of the Catholic Church in this country, which prominently displays the open letter addressed two days ago by the leader of the Church in the UK – Cardinal Cormack Murphy O’Connor – to the government. It appears that it is indeed the policy of the Church that its agency accepts only married couples or, in limited cases, single individuals as potential adopters: single people are sometimes preferred, for instance, if children have been victims of abuse by parents of a particular gender.

So why is there a problem about stating that couples are not being rejected for adoption because they’re gay (which would be discriminatory under the terms of the law) but because they’re unmarried? That would be no more nor less discriminatory than under the prevailing legislation, and a strong argument could be made that the policy reflected the Church’s view about what was in the child’s best interests. And it’s these interests that should ultimately be paramount, something which is often lost from view in all the arguments centring on adopters’ rights.

Part of the problem appears to be political. Adoption is being used as another ‘test case’ for the bill in the same way that the right for hoteliers and B&B owners to turn away gay couples was advanced two weeks ago as an illustration of how the new law supposedly violates Christians’ freedom of conscience. In both cases, the examples in practice appear not to add up: Christian adoption agencies wouldn’t be obliged to take on gay couples because they could say they consider only married couples; Christian guest-house owners – before and after the new law is passed – wouldn’t be obliged to accept anybody they might consider unsuitable if it’s their property they’re denying access to – and on grounds of consistency, they ought to turn away unmarried straight couples for the same moral reasons. So these arguments are being brought forward as emotive, rhetorical illustrations of a conflict of conscience that in practice should hardly arise, in order to apply pressure for exemptions to be granted or modifications to be made to the bill.

However, on further examination, there does seem to be a more fundamental issue. As stated above, the Church on occasions accepts single people as adoptive parents. Gay individuals – whether in a relationship or not – are by definition single, according to the Church, which regards the idea of gay marriage as invalid. Therefore, it is conceivable that a gay person who approached a Catholic adoption agency on an individual basis – but who happened to also be in a stable relationship – could claim that (s)he was being discriminated against on the grounds of sexual orientation if (s)he was not taken on by the agency. By referring to gay couples rather than gay individuals in the letter, the Cardinal is distracting attention from this issue. But it’s ambiguous situations such as this that make it necessary for Christian agencies to be granted an exemption because then they are allowed in law to make sexuality an explicit reason for rejecting an application to become an adoptive parent.

So much for gay individuals. But another fundamental logical and philosophical / theological issue that appears to be at the heart of all this is the question of gay marriage. If it’s accepted that it’s discriminatory for gay individuals or couples to be denied access to goods and services on grounds of sexual orientation, then on principle it could also be held to be discriminatory that gay people were denied the right to marry. If gay marriage came into law, this would make it much more difficult for the Church to employ the argument set out above: that they accepted only married couples as adopting parents. This is why the Cardinal’s letter makes great play of the traditional Catholic concepts of marriage as essentially a union between a man and a woman, which creates the context in which a child can be most fully nurtured and brought up happy and secure. And this provides another explanation for the need for Church agencies to be granted an exemption that explicitly refers to a couple’s sexuality and gender as the reason for their not being accepted, rather than their marital status.

So what we have here are the opening salvos in a battle whose ultimate stake is the status and future of marriage itself. The examples of conflicts of conscience affecting hoteliers and adoption agencies only really make sense in this conflict: gay couples can be turned away without any legal consequences if that’s all they are – unmarried couples, disapproved of for that reason. But if gay marriage came into law, then it would be necessary to state explicitly that the reason for those couples being rejected was that they were gay.

But the fundamental question remains: is it discriminatory – in fact rather than in law – to reject gay individuals or couples as adopting parents because they’re in a gay relationship? And secondly, is it discriminatory to deny gay couples the opportunity to get married? I refer to rejecting gay people as adopters ‘because they’re in a gay relationship’, rather than ‘because they’re gay’, because it would surely be both discriminatory and contrary to Catholic teachings to dismiss single persons as adopters because of their sexual orientation: the Church does not teach that it’s wrong to be gay but only that it’s wrong to have gay sex; and, as stated above, it does consider single people as adoptive parents in particular circumstances.

I do not in fact think that it is discriminatory for the Church to uphold a particular ideal of the family into which they seek to place children through adoption. That’s being true to their faith mission and to their duty of care to the children as they see it. But, by the same token, one could say that this rule presupposes exceptions, or should I call them exemptions? In other words, there might be cases in which even Catholic adoption agencies could take the view that it would be in the best interests of a child to allow him / her to be adopted by a gay parent – even one in a relationship – if, for instance, the adopting parent were already that child’s main carer and they’d established a loving relationship. The Church, it seems to me, neatly side-steps these conflicts of conscience by referring such individuals or couples to agencies that will take them on. And Catholic adoption agencies must come across hundreds of similar cases where what appears to be in the best interests of the child does not quite fit the Catholic model of the perfect family. Perhaps the Church’s position would look a little less discriminatory if its agencies were allowed to show a little more discrimination (discernment) in differentiating between unsuitable and suitable gay individuals or unmarried couples (gay or straight) that might in fact make wonderful adoptive parents.

On the question of gay marriage as a case of principle – rather than as something that might cause practical problems when attempting to deny services to gay couples – I don’t think any credible case can be made out for regarding the Church’s denial of marriage to gay people as discriminatory. The Church takes a particular view, which is not that of the state and the law, about what marriage is and to whom it is available; and nothing would change about that if gay marriage was introduced as a civil institution. However, what the introduction of gay marriage would require would be a re-examination and re-formulation of what marriage means for secular society today, and in particular what rights and responsibilities towards others it should involve. One of those rights arguably being the right to adopt, so long as one is likely to make a good parent. In this context, the Church needs to examine the implications of what it is saying about gay people and parenthood. Are they in fact implying that gay people per se can’t be proper parents, in the psychological and spiritual sense of parenting that’s at stake in adoption?

In a forthcoming blog, I aim to discuss how we might redefine the institution of civil marriage, in part to take account of gay marriage.

Big Brother Is Watching You: Why Jade Goody’s Demonisation Was Timely

2007-01-23T00:15:00.000Z

Big Brother Is Watching You: Why Jade Goody’s Demonisation Was Timely

Let’s accept for the moment that the row about the supposed racist bullying on Celebrity Big Brother has been blown out of all proportion to the actual offence (see blog of 21 January). I’m not saying it wasn’t offensive, as clearly, many thousands of viewers genuinely were offended. But it certainly wasn’t racist. Jade Goody’s words and actions expressed racial prejudices and stereotypes, that’s clear. But that doesn’t equate to racism. Jade didn’t say and do what she did because Shilpa Shetty is ethnically and nationally Indian but because she felt she was being looked down on by someone who thought they were socially superior, and because she was jealous. Bitching rather than bullying.

The terms ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ have become cheapened. Anyone who dares to say or even think anything that implies a prejudiced or negatively stereotypical view of another race or culture can now be labelled a racist; whereas, in fact, such views are an inevitable part of human nature and ignorance, and are often no different from the stereotypes different European nations have always nurtured about each other: French frog’s leg eaters, German sauerkraut munchers, etc. No one would seriously call these ridiculous clichés racist. Or would they? One thing’s for sure, people had better be on their guard from now on and mind their language, because the PC thought police have been alerted: Big Brother is watching us!

The fact that so many worthies – politicians, religious leaders, cultural commentators – have joined in the chorus of condemnation leads one to wonder what particular nerve this incident has touched. Jade has been made a scapegoat: not by the angry lynch mob seizing on a hapless bystander in order to seek vengeance for a violent rape or child abuse; nor by a racist political party blaming the Jew or the Asian for all its countries ills. No, this act of scapegoating has been endorsed by some of the highest moral authorities in the land. So it must be serving a particularly acute purpose for British culture at the present time.

Jade has been made a scapegoat because the BB antics have shown up the claim that Britain is an inherently tolerant nation to be a lie. The reality, as revealed by reality TV, is that we’re all a bit racist like Jade and her co-contestants: carrying within our heads any number of more or less unconscious prejudices about people of other races and cultures, which we perhaps sometimes voice in private or even rehearse in the silent realm of our unspoken thoughts; but never in public, never on TV before an audience of millions. That is clearly unacceptable. It’s unacceptable because it’s broken a taboo that’s become more powerful even than the former sexual taboos. We can now say the F-word as freely as we like; but say or do anything that has a hint of racism about it, and we deserve no place in the Big Brother house.

The important point is that the idea of tolerance has recently become a central plank in the project to define essential British values and virtues around which the integration of different cultures and religions can be achieved. Shilpa Shetty – a sophisticated, Westernised, successful career woman – stands as a symbol for this integration. One could say that she both symbolises the increasing integration of modern India into the global economy and culture, and serves as a model for a similar integration that many would like to see taking place between the West and the Muslim world. In this sense, Ms Shetty is the antithesis of the traditionalist Muslim woman who wears a veil out of deference to her husband and obedience to her faith. Just imagine the furore and international crisis that would have been sparked off if they’d put a devout, veil-wearing Muslim woman into the Big Brother house instead of Shilpa Shetty, and if she’d been the victim of racial abuse and bullying!

That wouldn’t have been racism, though, would it? That would have been, in fact, a rather uncomfortable combination of cultural and religious prejudice, and what many would perceive to be justifiable criticism and suspicion. That perception would be held by many of the people who now condone the scapegoating of Jade Goody for alleged racism. Far better to have an all-too similar example of prejudiced attitudes and behaviour that can be simplistically characterised and vilified as purely racist. Then there can be no confusion between racism and Western hostility towards traditionalist Islam; they can be kept in safe, distinct categories. One is bigoted hatred towards people ‘because of the colour of their skin’; the other is justifiable reluctance to tolerate traditional practices that appear to entrench potentially destructive cultural divisions. One is irreconcilable intolerance of difference; the other is intolerance of irreconcilable difference. However, both embody fear of, and prejudice towards, the Other.

So turning Jade into a hateful caricature of a racist has come at an opportune moment: it allows a clear distinction to be made in the eyes of the British public between unreasonable racism and reasonable criticism of Islam. And, at the same time, the ritualistic collective washing of our hands from the stain of racism allows us to demonstrate to the Muslim community that we are not racist like Jade, nor crudely Islamophobic; but that actually, we believe in fairness, unity and equality between different races and cultures: that – unlike Jade – we do really tolerate difference and wish only to bring about a society in which all people and cultures can be treated with equal respect.

Except that – in the person of Shilpa Shetty – it’s not difference that’s being embraced but a vision of assimilation. Even more than East-West integration, Ms Shetty symbolises the arrival of India as a power in the West: the aspiration of modern India and ethnic Indians to compete on level terms – or even on superior terms – with Western nations on the global stage. Jade, on the other hand, tapped into an undercurrent of resentment about the growing economic and cultural success and influence enjoyed by India and ethnic Indians, in this country and globally. India is asserting itself proudly and rapidly becoming an invaluable cog in the Western economy, which is increasingly dependent on the services and skills provided by Indian firms at a fraction of what they would cost using Western staff. What was especially insulting towards Indians in some of Jade’s remarks was that they exemplified a stereotypical image of India as backward and dirt-poor: an attitude inherited from the era of Empire, when India was indeed in a highly inferior and dependent position in relation to the West; the age of the Indian take-away not that of the Indian take-over.

So it’s not really Indian cultural differences that are being defended in the BB case against the ‘racist’ that wants to keep ‘subordinate’ races in their place. Rather, it’s the right of Indians and India to be more like us – more like us, in some ways, than we even are ourselves. So much so that the posh-speaking Shilpa exemplified almost a complete role reversal: she was the classy, well-mannered ‘princess’ speaking perfect grammatical English; while Jade felt relegated to the category of the retrograde, ill-mannered underclass speaking crude and ungrammatical English. English, in other words, like what it’s spoke in England today; not as in our imperial past, which is how it is learnt in India. Jade’s was the response of the former colonial nation that fears that its former slaves will become its masters: irrational and unjustifiable this may be, but there is not a total absence of anything in reality to make those fears seem believable to some. But for the liberal intelligentsia, Shilpa symbolises a righting of historical wrongs: the right to equal access to the benefits of Western civilisation that were denied to Indians under the Empire. The right, that is, to be an equal partner in our continuing imperialism: the ethical imperialism that seeks the global triumph and vindication of 'our values' – those 'Christo-liberal' values of economic, social and personal freedom, equality and unification to which only the ‘extremist’ (rabid racist or fundamentalist Muslim) could possibly object.

Only those, in other words, who are pariahs because they beg to differ.

Big Brother, Little Britain: Have We Suddenly Become an Intolerant Society?

2007-01-21T10:28:00.000Z

Big Brother, Little Britain: Have We Suddenly Become an Intolerant Society?

What a lot of cant has been written and spoken about the Big Brother ‘racism’ row this week! For a start, it is not at all self-evident that the behaviour and remarks about the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty made by celebrity contestants Jade Goody and others do qualify as racism. Prejudiced and insulting they may be; but racism is an extremely strong term. One can have racial prejudices without being racist. Racism implies having a hatred towards an individual or ethnic group simply because of their race or religion. I don’t think Jade Goody’s antagonism was motivated – at least not primarily – by race hate. Channel 4 was right to state that they were unsure whether the hostility shown towards Shetty Shilpa wasn’t more to do with cultural and class differences. And I believed Jade herself when she disowned any racial motivation in what she’d done. Of course, there can be unconscious fear and dislike of other races; but I don’t think any human being alive is totally immune from that.

The reality of whether or not Jade and her co-contestants have acted in a racist way has become less important than the need to banish any appearance of racism from our TV screens. For once, reality TV has done its job and exposed racism for what it mostly is: petty, bound up with silly cultural stereotypes, and just part of the language and coping mechanisms through which people of different classes and backgrounds vent the frustrations of having to live together. But it’s not race hate, in this instance at least.

The irony of it is that it’s some of the champions of Britain’s supposed intrinsic tolerance that have been most up in arms condemning the behaviour of the contestants as symptomatic of – in Archbishop John Sentamu’s words – “an ugly underbelly in society only too ready to point the finger at the foreigner, or those who might not fit in”. Well, I’m sorry; it’s condemnation of Jade in these terms that shows Britain up as an intolerant society just as much as her actual words and actions. Those remarks are classist and prejudiced in their turn: based more on a stereotypical image of ill-educated, working-class racism than the reality of what went on. I think the biblical injunction applies: do not condemn the splinter in your brother’s eye until you remove the plank from your own.

Jade has become if anything more of a scapegoat than the scapegoat she supposedly made Shilpa into. As with any scapegoating, it’s been necessary to distort and exaggerate the supposed evil Jade represents; and then cast it onto an acceptable object for our derision: an ignorant, ‘undeserving’ celebrity from a ‘white-trash’ background. In this way, she can be fully separated out from the mainstream of tolerant, educated, middle-class Britain to which people of all races – such as Shilpa Shetty or John Sentamu – have the right to aspire.

There’s a word for this: inverted racism. But let’s not confuse it with race hate. Let’s just call it verbalising class and cultural prejudice. A necessary outlet, indeed, to ensure we can all still get on together.

Britain As a World Power: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Six)

2007-01-12T09:06:00.000Z

Britain As a World Power: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Six)

According to news reports, Tony Blair is to give a speech today in which he will put the case for Britain retaining a role as a “major player on the world stage” (sounds like himself after leaving his post as PM), i.e. remaining what you might call a ‘world power’. In Blair’s view, this is important above all in the context of the fight against global terrorism, whereby Britain has a duty – alongside its allies – to stand up for the values it believes in.

Most people would agree that it’s important to try to defeat homicidal terrorist organisations and prevent any further atrocities such as 9/11 or the July 2005 London bombings. However, most British people would now, I think, be sceptical that the best way to do this is to send our troops to former outposts of the British Empire such as Afghanistan and Iraq to wage futile wars we cannot win, in the usual sense of the term.

But I’m not intending to enter the debate over the ‘War on Terror’ here. What Mr Blair’s sense of Britain’s global mission exemplifies, it seems to me, is what I termed the ‘British’ value of ‘ethical imperialism’ (see the second blog in this series, dated 3 December). The idea that Britain in and of itself – irrespective of the degree to which our European allies are prepared to co-operate with this mission – has a moral duty to remain a world power and help lead the struggle against the evil of terrorism is a clear inheritance of the British Empire and the ethical purpose that Britain always strived to bestow upon its imperialism. This purpose was then – and is now increasingly once more becoming – one of establishing and maintaining a particular Western form of civilisation, which elsewhere I’ve referred to as ‘Christo-liberalism’: an ambiguous combination of social and economic liberalism with an ethics and humanistic spirituality derived from (but not necessarily completely consonant with) traditional Christian beliefs.

Wanting to help defeat murderous terrorism, and maintain international peace and security, is one thing. But with Blair, this comes with a mission: ultimately, that of defending and perpetuating a vision of Britain’s very identity as in some sense indissociably bound up with Christo-liberal values and the future of Christo-liberal civilisation. Whether this set of values is in itself coherent and capable of building cultural integration and national unity within Britain is a debate in itself. Whether this set of values is the flagpole on which British forces should be pinning the Union Jack in battles against Muslims (as if this could defeat ‘Islamist’ ideology rather than inflaming it) is of course another.

But really, is it sustainable for Britain (or should that be Tony Blair?) to keep posturing as a world player? In the business world, most people agree that in the era of globalisation, the real powers in the 21st century – along with the USA – will be Brazil, China, India and Russia. Islamism could be seen as an attempt to reunite the Arab-Muslim world into a rival power to these massive states. Curiously, Afghanistan and Iraq are frontier lands between the Arab-Muslim world and three of those 21st century powers.

Dear old Little Britain, on its own, doesn’t have a prayer. Don’t we need to reinvest our energies, and – in the context of the threat of climate change – energy, into trying to build a sustainable economy and security situation in partnership with our European neighbours?