THE MARRIAGE FILES
The purpose, limits and fate of marriage
By Patricia Morgan
Wilberforce. 276 pages, £9.00
ISBN 978 0 957 572 539
This book is a brilliant analysis of why marriage matters so much and how gay marriage (SSM) is actually a counterfeit – neither ‘equal’ nor the same – and why the larger push for sexual minority rights must be countered before it is too late.
In the process, Patricia Morgan sensitively handles the brokenness of the human condition while pointing us forward. It is a boon to marriage and family organisations, politicians, church leaders, youth workers, teachers, parents and grandparents.
Duped
‘The devil was creating havoc while Christians were having a lovely “knees up”… they didn’t even know what was going on in Parliament’ (Lyndon Bowring on church engagement with 60s politics). Fast forward to SSM and déjà vu! True, C4M and some were heavily invested, but in the main, a frightened and demoralised church was back-footed. Morgan’s book helps explain why.
The institutionalisation of the Sex Revolution has thus been a double blow, both because it is now embedded across culture, but also because of the significant collateral damage ensuing. The price is only now fully emerging. More than ever the church needs to challenge ‘liberated’ but damaging norms. Love and care require speaking out against damaging practices.
Why marriage?
Morgan carefully articulates the role of properly functioning marriage (heterosexual, binary, monogamous, permanent) and its monumental benefit to both adults and children; we need it far more than we know, and children need it most of all. She points out the noxious impact of no-fault divorce, cohabitation, promiscuity, etc. Heterosexual transgression and its tacit acceptance had already badly damaged the institution of marriage. This has allowed gay marriage to become a plausible option and gay marriage has in turn damaged the institution yet further.
Morgan allows for a plural understanding of society – i.e. people have the right to choose their own lifestyles. LGBT activism could have left marriage alone, but sadly, it did not.
So, for Morgan, what is most concerning is the future of marriage as an institution which impacts us all. It has been under attack quite literally for decades by leading opinion formers who hate its alleged oppressive patriarchal, monogamous features. Gay marriage is arguably a subversively ‘conservative’ mode of revolutionising marriage from within: ‘Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there – because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie’ (gay activist Masha Gessen, 2012, Sydney).
Other aspects
Morgan ably covers all sorts of related themes through examining the evidence. For instance, answered are claims that SSM will stimulate gay desire for nuptial bliss (it does-n’t); that gay marriage will ‘strengthen’ straight marriage (wrong again); that the ideals and practice (statistically) relative to gay marriage are the same as for straight marriage (they aren’t); that gay wellbeing and health are the same as for heterosexual populations (wrong again); that children do as well or even better with lesbian couples than with their married biological parents (so very wrong). She answers the clarion call to fight homophobia in schools ably and well: all bullying is egregious, but the lion’s share – over nine out of ten times – has to do with appearance, not ‘orientation’; where is the moral outrage there? ‘Gay’ penguins sadly revert to ‘heterosexist’ norms – just tell that to the authors of And Tango Makes Three. And so on.
