The primary commandment is to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. I have been reminded by one ordained constituent that that should be used as a way of defining the second great commandment, which is to treat my neighbour as myself. Essentially, we are asking whether we can remove the barriers that stop same-sex couples enjoying the commitment—the “at one” meaning—of marriage. That is what the Bill comes down to. It does not redefine marriage; it just takes away barriers.
I was taught by three people who were homosexual. I only knew one was homosexual at the time. He got married aged 60 to a woman, one got murdered by a rent boy and one spent 30 years in the Community of the Resurrection. In his book, “Someday I’ll Find You”, Harry Williams, who also wrote “The True Resurrection” and “The True Wilderness”, explained the difficulty of coming to terms with his homosexuality. He should not have had to do that. He should have had the chance of a happy life, whether or not he chose to partner with somebody else.
People have said that there is huge psychological effect on a child of being brought up by two people of the same sex. That is not my experience of those I know. Incidentally, the children who turn out best are not those of a husband and wife married to each other throughout the child’s upbringing, but those of widows, because widows feel a sense of responsibility and have the support of society.
Leaving children aside, we ought to have the same kind of understanding that Margaret Thatcher showed when, in 1967, she voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. That was the year Chief Justice Warren of the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a unanimous judgment in a case called Loving v. Virginia, where a couple, one called “Black” and one called “White”, wanted to be married in the state of Virginia. Read the judgment and understand that that case got to the Supreme Court because people were putting arguments against people of different colour being able to live together. Those arguments are absurd now, and it is absurd that we are having this debate.
The difference between a civil partnership and a civil marriage is that in a civil partnership the registrar speaks and in a civil marriage the couple are able to say “I do” and “I declare”, in the same way that in church they say “I will”—but in the civil sense, that is the only difference. I wish that those who have spoken against the Government’s proposals—incidentally, they were foreshadowed in “A Contract for Equalities”, which was launched by the current Home Secretary before the general election—