My Lords, by any stretch of the imagination same-sex marriage is something of a social experiment. Its consequences cannot accurately be foretold, certainly not in this country. Amendment 47 requires a review of the legislation to be conducted by a Lord Justice of Appeal, two years and again five years after the Act is
passed, with reports published within six months of each of those two reviews. If the amendment is carried, the reviews are to focus particularly on the impact of the legislation, first on civil liberty and secondly on the rates of opposite and same-sex marriage.
The reasoning behind the amendment is that the impact of same-sex marriage on marriage rates should be reviewed, because evidence shows that redefining marriage undermines support for marriage in the wider society. I draw two examples. After same-sex marriage was introduced in Spain, marriages across the whole population plummeted by more than 20% in the following six years. It has been said that the relaxation of divorce laws that occurred at about the same time as the introduction of same-sex marriage had something to do with this fall. No doubt it did, but it could not account for the full extent of that 20% fall. Without going into the detail, the Netherlands also saw a significant fall in marriage rates after marriage was redefined there.
The focus of the reviews on the consequences of same-sex marriage for civil liberty will enable evaluation of the effectiveness of the Government’s quadruple lock. More broadly, many civil liberty concerns, some of which we have just heard again in the preceding amendment, have been raised with respect to the Bill, only to be largely dismissed by the Government and other supporters of the legislation. With the greatest respect for the Minister, I must say that we have now seen more than 50 amendments in Committee. On several occasions I would have expected words from the Front Bench along the lines of, “We will take away what has been said and consider it”, or, “We intend to review what has been said in the Chamber”, or, “I will take this away and discuss what he has said with the noble Lord”. I can think of only two examples of this taking place. If the Minister can disabuse me of the idea that only two or three amendments have received that sort of response, I will be delighted to know how many more there are.
It seems to me that the noble Baroness’s instructions are heavily annotated with, “Do not concede”. From my standpoint, and that of others who have spoken to me in the margins of Committee before this third day, it seems that the Government are putting some sort of stone wall around the Bill, and refusing to concede anything at all of any substance. Whether that is right or not—and I look forward to being disabused of that idea—I would be delighted to know that the Government are going to take away substantial parts of this discussion to review before we come to Report.
Putting that to one side, the reviews set out in the amendment will be able to consider the extent to which the Government’s assurances have been vindicated or contradicted by events. Concerns about the impact of same-sex marriage on civil liberty arise partly because of what has already happened. Again, we have just had a comment on that in the preceding amendment. Believers in traditional marriage have been punished, both in the UK under the current definition of marriage, and also internationally in those countries which have redefined marriage. We have heard the case of Aidan Smith, which has been much quoted in the last three days of Committee, and was referred to again by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester.
There were three more examples in very quick time. The former leader of the SNP, Gordon Wilson, was voted off the board of Dundee Citizens Advice Bureau for supporting traditional marriage. Arthur McGeorge, a bus driver, faced disciplinary action by his bosses simply because he had shared during his break time at work a petition backing traditional marriage. The World Congress of Families wanted to hold a conference on redefining marriage at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, but it was banned by the Law Society and the conference centre, because, as they said, discussing the subject of redefining marriage would be a breach of diversity policies.
Elsewhere in the world—to get the drift of where all this is going—a Christian florist in Washington state who said that she could not provide flowers for a gay couple’s wedding because it was against her beliefs is being sued by the couple concerned. In Canada, a sports journalist, Mr Damian Goddard, was fired for tweeting that he supported traditional man-woman marriage. In April this year, New Zealand voted to redefine marriage, with the law taking effect from August this year. Within weeks of the vote, the charity, Family First New Zealand, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage, was told by the New Zealand Charities Registration Board that it would lose its charitable status because its activities did not provide public benefit.
This is the climate that we are in. My proposed new clause seeks to have the Bill reviewed at two stages when it becomes law—assuming that it does, and I am sure that it will. I say to the Front Bench that if the Government are so very confident that there is nothing to fear and that the Bill is watertight—and I would be delighted to find that that were the case—it follows that they should have no fear of demonstrating its success by those reviews. I am not so sure necessarily that that will follow. To go out to public consultation, to go out to opinion polls as to where this goes—we have heard this debated in your Lordships’ House in the past. On the one hand, 83% of people taking part in the consultation on the Bill were apparently against it. The ComRes poll and the bulging postbags that we have heard about all seem to show that the Bill is not a very good idea. On the other hand, the polls that have been put forward by Stonewall and others suggest that the Bill is probably a very good idea. Going out to the public in those sorts of ways is not going to produce much of a result. To measure the result of the Bill at the two-year point and the five-year point, and having it done independently and with judicial scrutiny, seems to me to be the way to resolve whether it is going to work and will allay a great deal of public concern which exists at the moment. I beg to move.