On Misunderstanding the Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage

There's a blog of which I'm fond which is currently running a hugely disheartening post, setting forth the arguments -- as the blog's author understands them -- against same-sex marriage.

It's a puzzling post, and a disappointing one, cluttered by at least two substantial asides and marked by a complete failure to engage with what's being said by those who are speaking up in defence of marriage.

That may well be our fault. Our arguments shouldn't be so easily misunderstood, or misconstrued, or misrepresented. We may have to make the case all the more clearly.

I agree with the author an immense amount of the time, not least by virtue of likewise being politically centre-left, ardently europhile, and a big fan of both Germany and dogs. I'd very much like to meet him in person, as I think he'd be fun, interesting, and thoughtful; he comes across that way. I've also -- one distressing and I think deeply unfair episode aside -- long thought him an absolute model of how people should conduct themselves on the internet, and have directed people to his blog many a time for guidance in that regard.

Not this time. Having at one point thought same-sex marriage wouldn't be that big a deal, I've come to change my mind on this, and I'm astounded by this caricature of views such as mine, not to mention flagrantly wrong and deeply offensive claims that all arguments against same-sex marriage being legalised come down to homophobia.

Yes, I know that on his blog he says that it's discrimination rather than homophobia, but that explains nothing; discrimination is a term that denotes action, not what lies behind an action, and on Twitter it seems he's pretty clear on what lies behind opposition to legislation for same-sex marriage.

Summing up the arguments against the redefinition of marriage, someone earlier today said to him, 'It's simple: gays are an abomination. That's their only argument. The rest is window-dressing.'

The reply?

'Yes. Nail on head. Rest depends on how "reasonable" they're trying to appear.'

Sigh. We've reached a very bad point in our discourse when decent, sensible people are willing to condemn everyone who disagrees with them as homophobes and hypocrites.

Allowing for the fact that the civil partnership scheme gives same-sex couples equal rights to married ones in English law, it seems there are one or two areas where gay couples feel they are discriminated against in terms of not being allowed to marry, just as -- as Peter Tatchell and Nelson Jones argue -- straight couples are discriminated against in terms of not being allowed to enter into civil partnerships.

Though hardly tangible things, I've come to agree that these are valid concerns, as it happens, albeit not ones that it's beyond our wit to find ways to resolve.

Ways, I mean, that won't necessitate abolishing marriage as currently understood, that won't impose restrictions on already recognised rights to freedom of conscience, belief, and religion, and ways that won't require us as a society to abandon the only institution we have that exists to promote and protect the principle that ideally every child would be raised by his or her mother and father.

I'm currently wondering whether Julie Bindel has a point, and whether we might want to think in terms of something like the French system if we want to resolve this and ensure everyone feels fully equal in the eyes of the State. It seems I'm not the only one thinking along those lines. I don't think such concerns can be put down to homophobia. I think this is a 'gay' issue even less than it's a 'religious' one.

Anyway, to go back to the post that troubled me, what does the blogger regard as the arguments being deployed against the government's proposal to legislate for same-sex marriage?

1) This isn't civil marriage, it will be forced on churches
The government has expressly said that the proposed change relates to civil marriage and churches will not be forced to marry same sex couples (just as for example divorcees cannot marry in the Catholic Church: they set their own rules on this).

And onwards then into a lengthy digression about some dodgy reporting on the part of the Mail.

Ignore that, and focus on the key point -- which the blog, like the government consultation, passes over -- that there's no such thing in law as 'civil marriage', just as there's no such thing as 'religious marriage'. 

There is only 'marriage'. Anybody who tries to make out that there are two types of marriage in English law either doesn't understand what marriage is in English law, or doesn't care. I'll leave it to you to decide which category the Government falls into. This matters. We can't conduct an honest and reasonable discussion of whether marriage should be changed unless we recognise what marriage is.

Yes, there are religious marriage ceremonies and civil marriage ceremonies, but it's the ceremonies that are deemed religious or civil, not the marriages themselves. To assume that a marriage ceremony is the same thing as a marriage is to mistake a doorway for a room. This misunderstanding cuts to the heart of the Government's same-sex marriage consultation document.

I'm far from convinced by government claims that religious organisations would not be forced to celebrate same-sex marriage ceremonies, and not just because I don't trust this government, with its confusion of weddings and marriages and its pretense that there's a legal distinction between civil and religious marriages, and its questionable approach to university fees, the NHS, pension schemes, workers' rights, and the European Union.

Given that there's no legal distinction between religious and civil marriage, such that there is only one thing the law recognises as marriage, surely it would be unfair discrimination to limit the ways in which people could enter that institution on the grounds -- it would be argued -- of their sexuality?

I think it must have been with reference to this fact, rather than with reference to the substance of the European Court of Human Rights' recent Gas and Dubois ruling, that Neil Addison has been quoted as saying,

'Once same-sex marriage has been legalised then the partners to such a marriage are entitled to exactly the same rights as partners in a heterosexual marriage. This means that if same-sex marriage is legalised in the UK it will be illegal for the Government to prevent such marriages happening in religious premises.'

In any case, the government gives no assurance that the the conscience rights of people will be respected with regard to the question of whether or not they shall be compelled to accept that  same-sex unions can be marriages. The consultation is particularly slippery on this point, blurring words in section 2.12 in a decidedly worrying manner, taking us right into the heart of Orwell country.

It's only prudent to be concerned about that now; you cannot parry a blow after it has been struck.

2) This is an Attack on Tradition
So was the ending of slavery, giving women the vote, decriminalising homosexuality and any number of other positive legislative changes that conservatives fought tooth and nail against.  This is the weakest of arguments: society changes and tradition per se cannot be a valid reason to discriminate. Marriage has constantly been redefined: a point I make in my original blog at some length.

Well, I basically agree with the blog on this, though if I were making a religious argument -- and I'm not -- I'd distinguish between Tradition and traditions. I might also point out that the Catholic Church welcomed the Wolfenden Report in the 1950s, which advocated the decriminalisation of homosexual acts, and to be fair to conservatives, I'd probably add that William Wilberforce, the key figure in Britain's abolition of the slave trade, was deeply conservative, while Emmeline Pankhurst died a member of the Conservative party.

That aside, though, I take the point; as my Dad has often pointed out, we used to send small children up chimneys, so it doesn't work to argue that we used to do things, so we should keep on doing them.

Not, of course, that the (functionally non-existent) gap between civil partnerships and marriages is any way comparable to that between slavery and freedom, disenfranchisement and enfranchisement, or criminalisation and decriminalisation. It is, frankly, risible to put the redefinition of marriage in the same category as those acts of basic social justice.

But then, I've not argued this, whereas I have argued the following point, which the blog spectacularly misrepresents and describes as disingenuous and nasty. 

3) This is About the Protection of Children
This is actually quite a disingenuous and nasty argument.  By bringing in children, as Cardinal O'Brien did, he sought to muddy the water and appeal to age old prejudices that gay people are somehow not to be trusted around children.

And so on. Of course, Cardinal O'Brien did no such thing, and I'd be pretty confident that he was most certainly not seeking to muddy the water. It's only possible to hold to that view if you think children are basically irrelevant to marriage. The Cardinal may well have used deeply inflammatory language, but he did so while cutting to the heart of the matter, and he's far from the first to have made the point he did.

Take Richard Waghorne, for instance, who made exactly the same argument as Cardinal O'Brien almost a year ago, albeit in measured and sensible language. It's not a 'religious' argument, in that it's not faith-based in any sense, but is one focused on what the point of marriage is, and what it contributes to society. And, for those tempted to hurl words such as 'bigot' or 'homophobe' at anyone with the temerity to disagree with them, it's worth bearing in mind that Waghorne is himself gay.

Let's get down to brass tacks. What is marriage? We could talk about primate pair-bonding, and about anthropology, and we could trawl through history, but that'd require trips to the library for books I've long ago read at home. More to the point, that would take me off-topic without adding anything to my argument, the multiplication of examples beyond necessity only ever cluttering things up; wherever it's found, the basic purpose of marriage invariably comes down to the same thing, which is that it's an institution that exists so each child can be reared by his or her mother and father.

To focus on England in particular, since at least the seventeenth century marriage has been explicitly recognised by Parliament as the union of a man and a woman, with such unions being ordained for three purposes, the first of which is the procreation and rearing of children. This matters. While we can argue about what we think marriage could or should be, from a legal point of view, it's nonsense for me or for anyone else to say what we think marriage is. In British law that's already established.

Yes, it's about love and commitment, but it's not just about that. Why on earth would the State care whether two people love each other? Why would anyone want the State to care? Julie Bindel's right on this, at any rate; nobody should need the State's approval for who they love.

What's more, neither the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor the European Convention on Human Rights recognise a right to same-sex marriage; both documents distinguish between men and women only in their articles on marriage, and explicitly associate the right to marry with the right to found a family, described by the UDHR as the 'natural and fundamental group unit of society'. What's being recognised here is that marriage as an institution reflects a basic biological reality.

Children are utterly central to marriage as a concept. Cardinal O'Brien wasn't being remotely disingenuous when he pointed this out, and as I've said, he's far from the first to have made this point. Richard Waghorne said it a year ago. Parliament said it three hundred and fifty years ago.

There is those who'll counter by asking why is it that old people or those otherwise incapable of having children are allowed to marry, if marriage is essentially about children.  Fair question, and one which has been addressed elsewhere, including by Waghorne in his 'responses to responses', but for now I'll just say two things:

• Obviously, marriage is an institution, as I've said, and not a mere ceremony. As such, complementary couples can marry when young in the hope of having children; regardless of whether or not that comes to pass, they can grow old together, such that old people can be married. As complementary couples incapable of having children can be married, it stands to reason that complementary couples incapable of having children can get married.
• The State only cares about marriage because it's essentially about children. Can you think of one other reason why the State would care about what two people get up to together? That's a case I've yet to see made by anybody advocating the redefinition of marriage: why should the State care whether two people love each other?

Now, nobody that I know is saying that gay people aren't to be trusted about children, and if they're thinking it they're keeping their thoughts to themselves. No, if anybody genuinely thinks this is what's being said they should get over their paranoia and start listening more carefully. Time and again I've heard people saying that plenty of gay people do a fine job of bringing up children -- indeed, I've said so myself and will doubtless say so again -- but that the State supports marriage to promote the position that children should ideally be raised by a mother and a father.

This isn't a binary argument, where people are saying that only one way of raising children is good and all others are bad; it's saying that only one way is rooted in our nature, and that it is an ideal for which we should hope.

As Matthew Parris said last October, in a Spectator column which was sympathetic to the idea of institutionalising same-sex marriage, 

'I’m glad I had both a mother and father, and that as after childhood I was to spend my life among both men and women, and as men and women are not the same, I would have missed something if I had not learned first about the world from, and with, both a woman and a man, and in the love of both.'

Like Waghorne, Parris is gay, which lends extra weight to his uncertainty on the wisdom of jettisoning so universal and natural a societal ideal. That all children, as much as possible, should have such opportunities is, I think, something that we should all champion. Marriage is the only public institution that our society uses to champion this ideal. Do people really want to cast this aside?

4)  This is God's Sacrament
Marriage does not stem from the Bible, it predates it and extends around the world to countries of many different faiths.  Few serious voices would argue it is uniquely Christian: it demonstrably is not. Moreover the Church does not make the laws in this country.  Parliament does.  The leaders of every political party support same-sex marriage and it was in the Conservative Party manifesto.  The Church does have the right to be heard, but it does not have the right to dictate.

It's weird that this should be wheeled out, as I've yet to hear even one Catholic or Orthodox Christian take to the airwaves to make this argument; and yes, it's relevant that I say 'Catholic' and 'Orthodox', because Protestants -- Anglicans included -- do not regard marriage as being a sacrament.

Indeed, Catholics don't regard marriage as being a sacrament in itself; rather, they recognise marriage as something natural to us, with Christian marriage alone being a sacrament. I doubt any Catholic would describe as sacramental a freely-contracted marriage between a Muslim woman and an atheist man, but it'd be an odd Catholic who denied that it was a marriage. If any Catholic is arguing that the State shouldn't change the law regarding marriage because marriage is a sacrament, said Catholic could do with sitting down with his or her catechism for a bit.

That's why you'll hardly ever find any Catholics arguing against the law being redefined on the basis that it's contrary to his or her religion. Catholics don't regard marriage, in the broad sense, as a religious issue. We accept it as a natural thing, an institutional reflection, as I've said, of our biological reality. It's brutally Darwinian, when you get down to it.

For what it's worth, the churches are not seeking to dictate anything to society -- another canard in the post -- but are merely seeking to contribute to the debate. Parliament will decide what happens. We all know that. It's melodramatic nonsense to claim otherwise.

I'd also point out that it's simply false to claim that the proposal to institute same-sex marriage was in the Conservative manifesto. It wasn't. It was undeniably and blatantly absent from the manifesto, which mentions marriages and civil partnerships just twice in its 131 pages, both times only with reference to tax breaks.

Sure, there's a line in the little-noticed and almost wilfully obscure Contract for Equalities that says the Tories would be willing to 'consider the case for changing the law to allow civil partnerships to be called and classified as marriage', but that document is not the Conservative manifesto, and lest anyone claim otherwise, I'd like them to explain to me why the word 'manifesto' doesn't appear once in its 29 pages.

It's worth remembering too that after the Contract for Equalities was published, David Cameron made it very clear that the Conservatives had no intention of renaming civil partnerships. Rather, he said, the Conservatives might look into the possibility of doing that.

There is, I think every reasonable person should agree, a substantial difference between promising to consider the case for something -- which sounds like a long and thoughtful process -- and announcing that the redefinition of marriage was going to be railroaded through parliament, irrespective of what people might think, and with complete disregard for the usual careful system of compiling a green paper, perhaps issuing a white paper, and then maybe introducing legislation.

It wasn't in the Liberal Democrats' manifesto either, despite Evan Harris falsely claiming otherwise*. The people have never been consulted as to whether this should happen, and the Government is adamant that the current 'consultation' isn't interested in that question.**

On balance, far from opponents of marital redefinition seeking to 'dictate', it's proponents of marital redefinition who appear to believe that they should be allowed impose their wishes upon society without such wishes being subjected to the normal process of democratic scrutiny, and regardless of the fact that such wishes thus far lack any democratic legitimacy or popular mandate.

5) It's Ours, You're Not Allowed It
How refreshingly honest it would be to hear this argument articulated.  It is in fact, as far as I can tell, at the base of every argument against same-sex marriage, no matter how it is dressed up.  This is a matter of discrimination per se: opponents believe they have the right to marry, but the state should be allowed to discriminate to withhold this right from others.

At this point I basically want to throw my hands in the air in frustration, not least because it assumes there's a crude 'us and them' dynamic at work, such that it's impossible for anybody who's gay -- such as Matthew Parris as cited above -- to have any doubts about whether the state should be institutionalising same-sex unions and calling them marriages.

It's eminently possible. Yes, I know the likes of Waghorne will be dismissed as self-hating gays for entertaining such reservations, but then we're into 'No True Scotsman' territory, and we all know that's a silly country, policed by the kind of absolutist fanatics Camille Paglia angrily refers to as Stalinists.

That aside, the European Court of Human Rights has already recognised that while men and women have the right to marry, men and women do not have a right to marry whoever they'd like. Individual countries can allow men to marry other men, and women to marry other women, but that's quite different from there being a right to such a thing. No rights are being withheld; the court recognises that the Convention identifies marriage as having a nature -- a specific meaning -- and it's not discrimination for that meaning to be respected.

Keep that in mind. According to the European Court of Human Rights, it is not discrimination for marriage to remain a complementary and conjugal institution.  Of course, the Court might change its mind tomorrow, but as things stand, that's the situation.

Take a look at the government consultation on same-sex marriage involves. It bypasses the fact that Parliament has defined marriage for centuries in such a way that it can't be shared without being redefined, or, if you like, it can't be opened up to others without ceasing to be what it has previously been.

Look at section 1.10 of that consultation, and then think about this. The Government says that it wants to make same-sex couples identical to different-sex couples in terms of marriage. Identical, mind, not merely equal.

There are a small number of important differences between marriages and civil partnerships; the Government is proposing to remove these differences.

• Marriage should henceforth be defined as being between two people of the either sex, rather than as hitherto between a man and a woman.
• Marriage shall henceforth be reduced to a public institution that recognises people's love for each other; the interests of children will no longer be recognised as central to the purposes of marriage.
• Marital vows shall no longer be necessary for marriages to be valid, as some people will be able to contract marriages through a bit of paperwork.
• Marriages shall no longer be dependent on sexual consummation, at least as the word has always hitherto been understood, for their validity; as same-sex couples cannot engage in the procreative-unitive act, consummation will have to be given a new meaning, which it'll be for the courts to decide and apply to everyone on a uniform basis, regardless of sexuality.

Or, putting it another way, the Government is saying that almost any adult couple can get married, but that in order for that to happen, it'll be necessary to tear marriage from its biological moorings, abolish it as currently and historically understood, and create something quite new -- which we'll call marriage -- in its place. And that something new, it seems to me, is pretty much what civil partnership would be were it open to everybody.

Let's not pretend this is about opening up marriage to gay couples; it's about abolishing marriage as it stands and supplanting it with a new institution, functionally identical to civil partnership, which would be called 'marriage' and would be open to everyone.

You might think that's a good idea, or you might not, but surely we can at least all admit that that's what's on the agenda.

Summary

I don't blame the blogger for not giving any of the arguments he lists any credence whatsoever. I wouldn't either, if they were being made, but they're not.

The most important of the arguments being made for maintaining the status quo is completely misunderstood, and the ultimate question of what marriage is and why the State should care about it is wholly disregarded.

And no, I'm not happy about writing this, but when somebody who I've long rated as a blogger and who I've long hoped to meet as a person basically says that I'm a homophobe who's merely trying to look reasonable, and that all those who agree with me are also homophobes who are likewise masking their hatred beneath a veneer of reason, then it's clear that the debate has moved into very nasty territory.

Because if someone who's surely sensible, reasonable, and nice will make these kind of assumptions, what are those who are none of those things likely to be doing? Because such people are of every persuasion.

We all have to live together. Most of us would probably get on with each other. There's a fair chance that the majority of us like tea, and that we'd happily while away an afternoon or an evening having a pint or three of something stronger together. We need to accept the fact that honest and intelligent people of good will can sometimes find themselves on opposite sides of a debate, and that sometimes people mean what they say.



Update: Originally I linked to the blog, and named its author, but I amended this shortly afterwards, as on reflection I didn't think it was fair. I'm trying to make the point that this debate's gotten absurdly polarised when decent people are assuming the worst of people who sincerely disagree with them; it's not about the blogger in question, save to say that he seems a good example of a decent person who's become convinced that all those who disagree with him are doing so because they think he's an abomination.

__________________________________________________________________

* No really. Have a listen. He says it at the 5:37 point, or thereabouts.
** The rest of this section deals with a wholly unrelated topic which every Catholic I know responded to when the story broke on Saturday with a mixture of horror and caution. It was obvious that whatever had happened in the Netherlands in the 1950s was abominable, but there seemed to be very few facts in the story; given how so many stories about the Church tend to be badly reported, most Catholics have learned to wait, gloomily, and see how the dust settles; since then the story has been somewhat clarified. Much more remains to be explained, of course, and I hope whatever investigation the Dutch establish gets to the bottom of this, but for now it seems clear that the only people screaming about Catholic perversion on this one are those who are utterly in thrall to an irrational and ingrained hatred of the Church. And, for what it's worth, I don't for a moment count any bloggers I admire among them.

Vincent and the Visitation, or Confusing Correlation with Causation

I feel uncomfortable commenting on Vincent Browne's article in today's Irish Times, because I've not read Marie Keenan's Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power and Organisational Culture. It's clearly an important book, and one I'll need to read. 

I've read mountains of statistical data and other research on abuse over the years, with special reference to Ireland and to the Church, but also more broadly, and it does seem to me that this is essential reading. I must know at least a couple of people who have copies, so perhaps I'll see if I can borrow one of theirs at some point.

That said, if Vincent Browne's representation of the book is fair, it seems to have at least one utterly colossal failing. Vincent's article consists of, in the main, two things: a potted summary of Marie Keenan's book, and a completely misguided criticism of the summary report of the recent Apostolic Visitation of the Irish Church. I'll quote his summary of Keenan's book at length:

'Clerical sexual abuse is inevitable given the meaning system that is taught by the Catholic Church and to which many priests adhere.

Contradictions in that system lead to failure, increase shame and a way of living that encourages deviant behaviour.

This is the thesis of a revealing book on sexual abuse within the church by an Irish academic and therapist who interviewed, at length, nine priests and brothers convicted of child abuse, who counselled several other clerical abusers and who undertook extensive research on the issue for her book Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power and Organisational Culture. The author is Marie Keenan of the school of applied social science at UCD.

[...]

The culture inculcated in Catholic clergy is that they are separate from other human beings because of their special “calling” from God, because of their sole capacity to administer the sacraments, to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, because of their power to forgive sin and administer the last rites.

From the moment of their ordination they are apart, apart in the minds of other convinced Catholics and apart in their own minds. And they are also celibate, because of that “calling”. Abjuring intimate sexual relations, sublimating their sexual urges and widely admired in the communities they inhabit on account of that sublimation.

Keenan says this theology of sacrifice eclipses all human considerations. She says her argument is not that clerical celibacy is the problem but a Catholic externally-imposed sexual ethic and a theology of priesthood that “problematises” the body and erotic sexual desire and emphasises chastity and purity, over a relational ethic (how as human beings we should treat each other).

She says this theology of sexuality contributes to self-hatred, shame and a sense of personal failure on the part of some priests.

This tension is often exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness on the part of many priests within a hierarchical, authoritarian church, subject to the authority of bishops or heads of religious orders, often allowing them with little sense of being in control of their own lives. And this is further added to by loneliness.

Some priests cope with this by easing off on the celibacy bit. Some ease off the celibacy bit with guilt, some with a sense of doing their best with their human frailties.

According to Keenan it is often the priests who aspire to priestly perfection and are hugely conflicted with the demands of such perfection that resort to child sexual abuse, usually, she says, not opportunistically, but consciously and deliberately over time. And this seems to be confirmed by other research.

Moreover, in many ways, the release of the confessional – the opportunity to dispel guilt in a secret ritual – compounds the problem. The “external” imposition (by the church) of the priestly ethic, rather than the cultivation of an internal ethic, also contributes to the propensity to abuse; for the construction of an internal ethic involves reflection on the impact of one’s conduct on the lives of others and that seems to have been missing in the make-up of many of the clerical abusers.'

While I've no doubt that there is something to this analysis, I don't see that it can possibly make sense. The statistics don't allow for it, as two considerations should make clear.

Firstly, clergy seem to abuse at a rate that is no higher and that may be significantly lower than the general male population. Yes, we all know that abusive clergy and those who've protected them and callously or naively facilitated their activities have done a nightmarish amount of harm, but the fact remains that in Ireland, clerical abuse is but the tip of a massive national iceberg of sexual abuse. The 2002 SAVI report found that for every person abused by a priest, 59 people were abused by people who weren't clergy. As Fintan O'Toole has said, the sex abuse scandal in Ireland has nothing to do with Catholicism.

Secondly, insofar as Catholic clergy have abused children, they don't seem to have abused at a more-or-less uniform rate. In America it seems about 4% of clergy have been subject to credible abuse allegations, and according to the first Murphy Report, accusations may have been levied at as many as 6% of priests who served in Dublin from the 1940s on. Damning though these figures are, it's striking that accusations seem only to have been levied at 0.6% of Catholic priests in England and Wales; given that the theology of the priesthood is no different in England than in Ireland, one wonders why Irish clergy seem to have been ten times more likely to abuse, or be accused of abuse, than their English brethren. 

It really looks to me as though Marie Keenan's book, at least as represented by the likes of Vincent Browne, eschews statistics for anecdotes, begs a few questions, and above all confuses correlation with causation.

On the Visitation

As for the rest of Vincent's article, well, it seems as though he rather missed the point of the Visitation, which was never intended to focus on the precise issue of abuse. Rather, it's worth revisiting how Benedict first announced plans for the Visitation, in his 19 March 2010 letter to the Catholics of Ireland:

'Furthermore, having consulted and prayed about the matter, I intend to hold an Apostolic Visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations. Arrangements for the Visitation, which is intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal, will be made in cooperation with the competent offices of the Roman Curia and the Irish Episcopal Conference.'

The purpose of the Visitation was to help the Irish Church towards  renewal. It would hardly within the remit of the Visitation to consider how society treats priests who had been found guilty of abuse or to have weighed up how the theology of the priesthood contributes towards a culture of abuse when the statistical evidence suggests it does no such thing. 

It should be recognised, though, that the Visitation clearly looked into the Church's current safeguarding procedures and found that they're up to scratch now. Of course, we know that; the Cloyne Report found that the Church's child protection policies are superior to those of the State, and on the basis of the various reports Ian Elliott had conducted into how those procedures are being implemented, it seems that Cloyne had been the weak link in an otherwise -- if belatedly -- strong chain.

That said, it is hugely unfair of Vincent to have said, as he did:

'In general there seems to be little interest in why this clerical abuse has occurred and what it is within the Catholic culture that has engendered it. The dismissive explanation that it is all due to the "flawed" personalities of the abusers ignores the cultural and formative factors that at least contributed to the phenomenon.'

Over the last day or so I've heard no shortage of snorting and sneering about the summary's focus on seminaries and the issue of fidelity to the teaching of the Church. The fact is that these are crucial to ensuring that the Church is renewed in Ireland and that abominations like the abuse scandal don't happen afresh. It's clear that both selection and priestly formation must have been deficient in the past, and there is widespread dissent from the teaching of the Church, not least among the clergy.

There's a sense in which there's a straightforward equation at work. Careful selection and better formation should lead to better priests, and better priests will be less likely to abuse, better equipped to deal with allegations of misconduct of whatever form, and better able to minister to their people.

The Visitation also addresses the issue of clericalism when it talks of a new focus on the role of the laity; it's asking ordinary Irish Catholics to step up to play a responsible, faithful, informed, and active role in the Church, rather than being passive figures.

The Summary should be recognised as being but a summary; it deals in broad brush strokes when it says that if we want a better Church we need a better clergy and a better laity, and while it hints at how these can be achieved, it doesn't dwell on detail. We can assume the detail is, has been, and will be a matter of serious discussion. Matters will become more clear.

In the meantime, we shouldn't be criticising the Visitation's summary for not being something it was never meant to be.

Leaving aside the Question of Whether there were Two Patricks...

Given previous posts arguing that Saint Patrick was a serious contender for the title of the Greatest Ever Briton, commenting on the impact he and other missionaries had on Britain and mainland Europe, pointing out that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn't get his legend quite right, and linking to a painting by the Brother of the mountain most closely linked with our first national saint, I was a bit of a loss as to what to say today.

And then I saw this story. It seems to be everywhere today.

Seemingly a Cambridge academic named Roy Flechner has announced that Patrick almost certainly fled to Ireland to shirk an inherited and unpopular career as a tax collector, and that while in Ireland, far from being a slave, he surely acted as a slave trader.  

It’s impossible to evaluate Flechner’s claims properly based on the various newspaper reports, as while they all say that Dr Flechner's published his research today, not one of them says where Flechner’s research can be found. I have no idea whether it’s in a journal or is a book in its own right. It seems that no journalists have done their job on this one. 

This Year's Fable

As much as it can constructed, Flechner’s thesis seems to be as follows:

Everything we can say with any confidence about Patrick is based on what Patrick himself told us; as such, we can’t take it at face value, not least because of the two extant documents written by Patrick – his Letter to Coroticus and his Confession –  the second seems to have been written in response to allegations of financial impropriety. 

(I'd also point out that the reference in it to spending 28 days crossing uninhabited country is most implausible, but let that go.)

The Letter says that Patrick’s father had been a decurion, an unpopular civil service position largely charged with tax collection, but the Confession refers to him as a deacon. Flechner argues that in Patrick’s lifetime Roman government was collapsing, which would have made it difficult and perhaps dangerous to discharge the duties of a decurion, and so became a deacon instead, passing on his decurial duties to his son.

Flechner takes the view that Patrick’s claim that he was kidnapped from Britain in his adolescence, forced to work as a slave, escaped after six years and returned to his home where he reclaimed his status should be regarded as fiction, an attempt at promoting and perpetuating his own image.

Escaped slaves, says Flechner, existed outside the law and could be killed with impunity or recaptured by anyone. What’s more, he says, ‘the probability Patrick managed to cross from his alleged place of captivity in western Ireland back to Britain undetected, at a time when transportation was extremely complicated, is highly unlikely.'

Instead, he reckons Patrick actually left Britain for Ireland as he wanted to escape the ‘poisoned chalice of his inherited position in Roman Britain’, and that he probably brought family wealth – in the form of slaves – with him to Ireland, becoming a slave trader before becoming a priest and missionary in his own right.

Now, I agree completely with Flechner that his thesis has the advantage of being free from the hagiographic reverence that has often vitiated attempts to retell Patrick’s story over the years, but I can’t help feeling that his thesis doesn’t quite work.

Patrick's Journey Home

The reference to Patrick feeling from his place of captivity in western Ireland leaves me uneasy, for starters. There’s nothing in either of Patrick’s writings that says where he was kept as a slave, barring a reference in the Confession to the journey from his place of captivity to the port from which he set sail from Ireland being about two hundred miles. Tradition, for what it's worth, has always said that Patrick's place of captivity was at Slemish in County Antrim. Yes, that’d be in north-eastern Ireland, not in western Ireland.

Here’s a painting of it by the Brother, if you’re interested. Not a bad spot, eh? I can think of worse places to be forced to work as a shepherd, even in snow, in icy coldness, and in rain.

Look at the Brother's site to look at it in gorgeous colour.

As for the difficulty Flechner envisaged Patrick would have had crossing the country, well, even if we discount the possibility of miraculous assistance, we still have to recognise that much of Ireland at the time was a land of forest and bog; it would have been dangerous to cross, but such inhospitable terrain would have been ideal country for runaways. I'm not saying the journey would have been easy, but it'd have been far from impossible.

He could have made it to the coast, and once there, who would have known he was a runaway slave unless he had somehow been branded to that effect? If he got home, is it really tenable that his own people would have sent him back as he hadn't been redeemed? That, after all, seems to be the implication of Flechner's claim that:

'The traditional story that Patrick was kidnapped from Britain, forced to work as a slave, but managed to escape and reclaim his status, is likely to be fiction: the only way out of slavery in this period was to be redeemed, and Patrick was never redeemed.'

I'm not saying Patrick might not have had to redeem himself to his former owner if he ever found himself in and around Slemish when he returned to Ireland as a mercenary, just that he says nothing either way on that subject; there's no evidence whatsoever to claim that Patrick was never redeemed.

The End of Rome

I’m also troubled by the assumption that in a situation where Roman authority and law was collapsing it would obviously have been the case that Patrick’s father Calpurnius’ decurial duties would have been passed on to Patrick when Calpurnius became a deacon. 

Partly I’m bothered by the improbability of such obligations being passed on to a teenage boy – for Flechner’s thesis to work, I think Patrick would have had had to have been an adult when his father became a deacon. That’s a change to Patrick’s chronology that wouldn’t be without repercussions.

I’m also bothered by the fact that Flechner seems to be glossing over how Patrick claimed in the first lines of his Confession that not merely was his father a deacon, but his grandfather Potitus was a priest:

‘I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age.’

It looks as though the priesthood was very much a family business for Patrick, and I’d be wary of putting too much weight on the reference in the Letter that says ‘by descent I was a freeman, born of a decurion father’.

More troubling still is the fact that Flechner seems to think that Patrick left Britain for Ireland at a time when Roman authority was collapsing. Traditional dating being unreliable, modern historians generally think Patrick was active as a missionary during the second half of the fifth century and so it seems unlikely that he can have been born much before 400 AD. 

So what? Well, Roman rule ended in northern and western Britain in the late fourth century, and ended in Britain as a whole in the early fifth century. Patrick was almost certainly from western Britain, somewhere between the Severn and the Clyde estuaries, so the likelihood is that Roman rule had ended at Bannavem Taburniae before Patrick was even born. 

Think about that. During the late Empire, decurions were tasked with collecting taxes on a local basis on behalf of the imperial government, but if Roman rule didn't apply in Bannavem Taburniae during Patrick's youth, then why on earth would his father have been expected to collect taxes? For whom? And is it even vaguely tenable that Patrick would have inherited such a pointless duty?

The fact is that Flechner has no more data to go on than anybody else, and that he's reading more into the sources than is actually there.

Surely, the most natural reading of the two documents is that Patrick's family were minor local aristocracy – the so-called decurion class – but that, given the collapse of Roman administration, they abandoned their previous decurial duties and took up ecclesiastical roles instead. It's wholly plausible that Patrick was one of the many Romanised Britons who were captured in Irish raids on the British coast, and that he spent years as a slave, before escaping, making his way to the coast and somehow being able to board a ship away from Ireland, eventually returning to Britain.

Don't believe me, though. There are children you can listen to instead.

Commonwealth Fantasies

There was an annoying article in last Friday's Daily Mail in which David Burnside MLP, formerly Ulster Unionist MP for South Antrim, argued that it was time for Ireland to rejoin the Commonwealth of Nations, formerly known as the British Commonwealth. This, he claimed, would be good for Ireland and good for the Commonwealth as a whole, as well as a wonderful present to Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of her sixty years on the throne.

Putting aside what we might think of Burnside's thesis, it's worth addressing some of his historical errors.

1. 'Relations between the Irish Republic and the UK were at their lowest ever point in the last third of the twentieth century because of the troubles.'

Is it really credible to decribe a 33-year period as a 'point', especially when the Republic of Ireland hasn't yet existed for 63 years?

Perhaps Burnside means that the specific lowest point in relations between Britain and Ireland since the Republic of Ireland act came into force occurred during that 33-year period. This is certainly an arguable claim, given that the most obvious challengers for the title of 'lowest point in relations between independent Ireland and the UK' -- the Economic War and the Emergency -- took place while Ireland was still a dominion.

2. 'Ministers in Charles Haughey’s Government shamefully helped to found and fund the Provisional IRA.'

Given that the Provisional IRA was founded in 1969, and that Haughey did not head a government until 1979, this statement doesn't quite add up.

Nonetheless, it's possible to see what Burnside is getting at, albeit in a muddled way. In 1970, during the so-called 'Arms Crisis', Haughey and Neil Blaney were both sacked from Jack Lynch's government for allegedly attempting to arm the Provisional IRA. The matter went to court, with Blaney being acquitted on 2 July 1970 and Haughey on 23 October 1970. I'm not saying the lads were innocent by any means, but I don't think anyone can claim with any degree of historical honesty that they were arming the IRA. We just don't know. 

3. 'The Republic continued its imperialistic, constitutional claim over Northern Ireland as an integral part of the Irish Republic, gave succour and support to IRA terrorism and refused to extradite murderers across the border to stand trial for their crimes.'

That the Republic, under the old articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, laid claim to Northern Ireland can hardly be disputed.

Whether it gave succour and support to IRA terrorism is probably a matter of debate, although a fair analysis of the subject would have to recognise that Provisional IRA never accepted the legitimacy of the Irish State, that IRA membership was illegal throughout the Troubles as it is now, and that between 1971 and 1993 it was illegal under section 31 of the Broadcasting Act for Sinn Féin members to speak on Irish airwaves in any capacity.

It is true that extradition warrants for terrorist offences were regularly turned down during the Troubles, either because their offences were recognised as having been politically motivated, or because in many case there was a concern that the accused would not receive a fair trial or would be mistreated in prison. Between 1972 and 1990, for instance, only 7 of 112 extradition requests were granted, with 41 being refused.

4. 'The Belfast Agreement brought the Irish Republic in from the cold.'

This statement is perhaps too nebulous to challenge, but I do not think many people would argue that Ireland had been a pariah state prior to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Even in terms of dealings with the United Kingdom over Northern Ireland the position is scarcely sustainable; it's important to note how Burnside omits 1985's Anglo-Irish Agreement from his thesis.

5. 'Britain’s recent £7bn loan to Dublin in the Republic’s hour of need as it faced the eurozone meltdown underlines Britain’s commitment to Ireland, her closest neighbour.'

This is true, as far as it goes, but it's somewhat disingenuous to paint this as an act of altruism. The Mail itself reported in November 2010 that British banks -- and by extension British taxpayers -- were owed £88bn by Irish banks. The British State loaned money to the Irish State so that Ireland could repay money Irish banks owed British ones. And that's not even getting into how much money British banks were owed by continental ones, with them fearing an Irish collapse could bring down the entire Eurozone, washing them away in the financial tsunami that would follow.

6. 'Last year’s Royal visit to the Irish Republic, with all the symbolism it contained - the Queen's visit to the Gardens of Remembrance for both British servicemen and also Irish Republicans who died during the War of Independence...'

The first of the two memorial gardens the Queen visited when in Ireland was the Garden of Remembrance. This is not merely a memorial to those Irish Republicans who died during the War of Independence; it is a memorial to all those who died in the cause of Irish freedom, including the rebels of 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, and the War of Independence.

The Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, the second memorial garden the Queen visited, is not a memorial garden for British servicemen. It pays no homage to the men of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire who were slain at the Battle of Mount Street Bridge, for instance, nor to those Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen who fell at Gallipoli.

Rather, the garden is a memorial to all those Irish who fell in World War One, in whatever army -- most served in the army of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of course, but others served in the American army, and yet more served in the armies of such British dominions as Canada and Australia.

The Great Cross of Sacrifice also bears the dates of the Second World War, so the gardens also operate as a memorial to all those Irish who fought and died as Irish servicemen in British or other uniforms during that struggle.

7. 'The old Fianna Fail Republicanism of De Valera, who withdrew the Irish Republic from the Commonwealth after the Second World War, should now be replaced by the independent Irish Republic rejoining the Commonwealth, where many thousands if not millions of Commonwealth citizens of Irish descent now live.'

It was John A. Costello, and not Éamon de Valera, who withdrew the Republic from the Commonwealth. Costello was Taoiseach from 1948 to 1951; it was under him that the Republic of Ireland Act was signed into law in December 1948 and came into force in April 1949. By becoming a republic we automatically left the Commonwealth; the British changed the rules a few days later, and de Valera took the government of the day to task for not applying to rejoin once it was possible to do so. I think Burnside's done him an injustice here.

Burnside's claim that thousands if not millions of Commonwealth citizens are of Irish descent is, of course, a colossal understatement. It is estimated that as many as six million people in the UK alone have at least one Irish grandparent, and this is without considering those of deeper ancestry, not to mention all those in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.

It's certainly arguable that David Burnside might well be right that Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth; the same can hardly be said of the arguments he puts forward in support of his case.

And yes, I know, there are probably better ways to spend my time than explaining why somebody in the Daily Mail is wrong. Still, what's done is done.

On First Looking at the Marriage Consultation

So, I've been reading the Government's Equal civil marriage: a consultation. Regardless of where people stand on the issue, they should quickly realise that it's a shoddy piece of work, undermined by the fact that its authors clearly don't know what they're dealing with.

I've just been glancing through it today, and think it might be worth getting a few of my thoughts down. For future reference, if nothing else.

A Couple of Oft-Misunderstood Points

In reading it, it's crucial to remember two things.

• Weddings and marriages are not the same thing. A wedding -- otherwise referred to as a marriage ceremony -- is an event. This event gives access to marriage, that being an institution.
• There is no legal distinction between civil and religious marriages. There are legal distinctions between civil and religious marriage ceremonies, but that's it. In English law, it is legally meaningless to speak of either civil or religious marriage. There is only marriage. That's it.

Bearing that in mind, you should realise that the document is misnamed. It's impossible to speak of 'equal civil marriage' in a meaningful British context; one can only speak of 'equal marriage'. 

Of course, those of us who subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are already signed up to the concept of equal marriage; men and women, it says, have the right to marry and found a family, with both men and women being entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution.  Calling 'same-sex marriage' 'equal marriage' is an Orwellian hijacking of an established term.

And before anyone pipes up, there's a reason why both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights speak of men and women in their articles on marriage; they specifically mean that men and women have the right to marry each other.

We have to read the documents in their entirety, and not look at articles in isolation. Both documents speak of 'everyone', 'all', and 'no one' in all their other articles, but specifically refer to 'men and women' only in their articles on the right to marriage.

If that sexual complementarity wasn't important, why not just say 'everyone' again? And why link 'men and women' to the foundation of the family, that being 'the natural and fundamental group unit of society', if the Declaration isn't about how families can be naturally founded? In nature, as Camille Paglia puts it, 'procreation is the single, relentless rule'. I'm pretty sure Darwin said similar things.

There's a handy annex at the back, including all questions being asked, and it gets interesting if you edit them to reflect legal reality. Look at questions five and six, for instance.

• Question 5: The Government does not propose to open up religious marriage to same-sex couples. Do you agree or disagree?
• Question 6: Do you agree or disagree with keeping the option of civil partnerships once civil marriage is available to same-sex couples?

Yep, utter gibberish. Questions five and six make no legal sense unless the Government is planning on legislating to create new institutions called 'religious marriage' and 'civil marriage'. As it stands, there's only the one institution, which we call marriage, and which has been defined, since at least 1662, as being the union of a man and a woman primarily for the purpose of bearing and rearing children.

Should Marriage Be Redefined?

People who have issues with the whole idea of truncating the definition of marriage such that it's reduced merely to a bond of commitment between two adults, and who believe that we shouldn't be casting aside the one institution that has always upheld the ideal that children should always be raised by their mother and father, will want to pay attention to the following four questions in particular:

• Question 1: Do you agree or disagree with enabling all couples, regardless of their gender to have a civil marriage ceremony?
• Question 2: Please explain the reasons for your answer. Please respond within 150 words.*
• Question 14: Do you have any comments on the assumptions or issues outlined in this chapter on consequential impacts? Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).
• Question 16: Do you have any other comments on the proposals within this consultation? Please respond within 1,225 characters (approx 200 words).

Granted, the Government may just smile indulgently at your concerns, as section 2.8 of the consultation document makes it clear that the Government plans on redefining marriage whether people like it or not.

Early Problems

Looking at the consultation, and bypassing the erroneous title, things get messy very quickly in the ministerial forward. Same-sex couples, we're told, have access to the same civil rights as married ones, bar the ability to be married and the ability to say they're married.

It's an odd sentence, and not merely because it wouldn't take much to say 'opposite-sex couples have access to the same civil rights as same-sex ones, bar the ability to enter into a civil partnership and the ability to say they're civil partners', which for some reason the government doesn't see as an injustice in need of rectifying.

No, as we all know, the Government's claim is not quite true. I'm pretty sure 'marriage' isn't a protected term in Britain. While they may not be able to say so for legal purposes, couples in civil partnerships regularly say that they're married, and so do lots of people when talking about them. What's being proposed here is that others should be compelled to accept that same-sex couples are married. That's a rather different thing.

And then, lest we think that that was just a slip, we see the false distinction between civil and religious marriage rearing its head before the page is out:

'That is why we are, today, launching this consultation to seek your views on how we can remove the ban on same-sex couples having a civil marriage in a way that works for everyone. We are clear that no changes will be made to how religious organisations define and solemnize religious marriages and we are clear that we will retain civil partnerships for same-sex couples.'

Obviously, I've tidied it up a bit. The 'topic' section on the next page, headed 'About this consultation', blurs issues in exactly the same way, making the law seem a lot simpler and more compartmentalised than it really is:

'This consultation seeks your views on how to provide equal access to civil marriage for same-sex couples.

The Government is focused on looking at this specific issue and is not considering wider reforms to marriage. It is therefore not considering any reforms to religious marriage. Neither does this consultation look at opposite-sex civil partnerships.'

Never forget. The State, like the Church, says marriage is just one thing. There's only one institution called marriage. It's one house which we can enter by either of two doors, not two semi-detached ones with their doors side-by-side.

Was the Government Listening?

Most of the 'Executive summary' is fair enough, though 1.4, 1.5, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12 feature these absurd phrases 'civil marriage' and 'religious marriage' again and again; it falls apart at 1.7 in more ways than one.

'We have listened to those religious organisations that raised concerns about the redefinition of religious marriage. We are aware that some religious organisations that solemnize marriages through a religious ceremony believe that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. That is why this consultation is limited to consideration of civil marriage and makes no proposals to change the way that religious marriages are solemnized. It will not be legally possible under these proposals for religious organisations to solemnize religious marriages for same-sex couples. There will therefore be no obligation or requirement for religious organisations or ministers of religion to do this. It will also not be possible for a same-sex couple to have a civil marriage ceremony on religious premises. Marriages of any sort on religious premises would still only be legally possible between a man and a woman.'

Let's read that backwards, starting with the last line. Marriages on religious premises will be illegal unless they're between a man and a woman. Ah, but the government means weddings, doesn't it? Otherwise a same-sex couple, married in the eyes of the State, would cease to be married once they stepped into a church. Think about it.

Perhaps more importantly, we have that wonderful statement that the consultation is only about civil marriage and not about religious marriage, even though they're the same thing.

And oh, look at the opening statement about the religious organisations that raised concerns about religious marriage. Did they really, Theresa and Lynne, did they really? Or did they raise concerns about marriage? Because I know the Church of England understands full well that in English law, there's no such thing as religious marriage, and I can assure you that the Catholic Church does too. So did they not make themselves clear or did the Government misunderstand? What exactly is going on here?

The Heart of the Matter

I'm tired of crossing out errors, but you'll see them again at 2.1 and 2.2. More interestingly, and in support of what I've been saying, 2.4 and 2.9 say basically the same thing, which is that there's no legal distinction between civil and religious marriage; it recognises a distinction between civil and religious weddings, but marriages are all deemed identical in law. Here is how 2.4 starts:

'There is, however, no legal definition of religious and civil marriage. Marriage is defined according to where it can take place, rather than being either specifically religious or civil.'

Obviously, the second sentence should read 'Weddings are defined according to where they can take place, rather than being either specifically religious or civil', but let's stay with the key fact that there's no legal distinction between religious and civil marriages. When government ministers or advocates of redefinition speak of 'civil marriage' or 'religious marriage', they're playing further Orwellian word games, making things sound neat, tidy, and easy to change. They're trying to make the whole project of redefinition sound reasonable, and playing down the effect it will have.

Marriage is a single phenomenon, the basic building block of British society and something integral to the British legal system, referred to 3,000 times in current law, not least in the official Anglican prayerbook, which is licensed by Parliament. There's no way this is going to be straightforward.

Would the Anglicans be obliged to celebrate Same-Sex Weddings?

2.10 and 2.11 are intended to allay the fears of those who fear Anglican ministers in particular would be obliged to celebrate same-sex weddings. The problem with these two sections is that they both perpetuate the myth that civil and religious marriage are different things. Given the way equality legislation works and how there's no distinction between types of marriage in British law, I think the Anglicans can be forgiven for being rather concerned that the Government's assurances can't be worth whatever paper they're written on; all else aside, would you trust them?

Because let's not kid ourselves: there are people who would happily see Christians criminalised for their views on what marriage is.

And What of Hate Speech?

2.12 is very slippery, and worth quoting in full:

'We are also aware that the doctrines of many faiths hold the view that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, and this belief is contained within the teachings of their faith. We are clear that no one should face successful legal action for hate speech or discrimination if they preach their belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.'

Yes, those are my italics. Note the shift from 'can' to 'should'. What would happen if someone -- an Orthodox Jew, say -- were to argue not that marriages should only be between a man and a woman, but that marriages can only be between a man and a woman? What if that same Jew were to argue that the same-sex unions the government called marriages were nothing of the sort?

The rather more vague 2.39 seems to clarify this, saying that there'd be no affect on religious organisations' ability to teach and preach their beliefs on the definition of marriage. If this, rather than 2.12 is to be the guiding principle here, it seems religious bodies are to be given the right to deny the authority of the state, which is nice though an odd thing to legislate for, but I'm still not convinced it works. 

Religious organisations are one thing, but what of individual religious believers? It's worth remembering too that the European Convention on Human Rights recognises the right to manifest beliefs in worship, teaching, practice, and observance. Is the government saying we'll only have freedom in teaching?

This, I think, is where question 14 could come in handy. Might be worth asking for clarification on that one.

Should a Law be Deliberately Vague?
Marriages being essentially about ensuring the children are raised by mothers and fathers, it's always been the case in law that consummation -- the procreative act -- has been an essential part of a marriage; even now, failure to consummate a marriage is grounds for dissolution of a marriage. 2.15 says that same-sex marriages should be identical to marriages as they currently stand in law, which raises a bit of a problem...

2.16 is superbly fluffy in how it dodges the questions of what would constitute same-sex consummation and what would constitute same-sex adultery. Clearly not wanting to go near the issue of what that might mean, the Consultation farms off the questions, saying they'll be for the courts to decide down the line.

This, frankly, is irresponsible, as it means that same-sex couples won't know if their marriages are legally valid unless their sex lives are inspected in court, at which point the court will redefine what counts as consummation. Of course, since any definition of consummation that the courts come up with for same-sex couples will have to be applicable to opposite-sex ones -- all marriages being identical in the eyes of the law -- this will mean that the very notion of consummation will itself have to change for everyone.

Something of a Double Standard

2.17-20 makes it clear that civil partnerships should be maintained for same-sex couples even if same-sex marriage is introduced. On this I think Peter Tatchell has a point; it doesn't make a lot of sense to redefine marriage to allow same-sex couples to marry if we're not also to redefine civil partnerships so they can be entered into by couples of different sexes.

Indeed, a part of me is persuaded that Julie Bindel may be on the right track on this; maybe the State should just abolish marriage as a civil phenomenon, and just open up civil partnerships to everybody. That would, at least, ensure that same-sex couples would become identical in law, rather than equal, with opposite-sex ones, whilst nonetheless preserving marriage as an ideal.

I'm not convinced some of those crying out for what they see as marital equality would run with that, though. It's very easy to change things when you think doing so will have no impact on your own life, but once you've to pay a price...

There is, of course, also the question of whether society should abandon the only institution that exists so that children are raised by their mother and father, leaving it solely to religious bodies to hold forth that ideal. This, for me, is the one serious stumbling block in this idea. Marriage is a good thing, after all. We all gain from it. 

A Glitch in the Proposal

2.23 conflicts with what's previously been said 2.6 as it says that a bit of paperwork will be all that's needed for civil partnerships to be converted to marriages. Given that marriages require public vows, as described at 1.10, and how according to 2.15 the idea of this proposal is to make them identical, with both same-sex civil weddings being conducted in the same way as civil weddings are currently conducted, public vows would surely be needed. 

Which is it? Vows or paperwork? Either?

A Dose of Reality

2.36 is a bit reassuring, as the government acknowledges that not all countries will accept same-sex couples as being married. This could be messy, though it's a particular hoop that Spain, the Netherlands, and a handful of other countries have jumped already.

More interestingly, 2.37 notes that marriage is a devolved issue, so this won't apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland. 

I'm not sure if that means same-sex couples deemed married in England might find that they're not regarded as married in Scotland and Northern Ireland, or if it's simply the Government's way of telling gay couples that they'd best not even think of running off to Gretna Green.

_______________________________________________________

* Or 1,225 characters (approximately 200 words) according to the main text. I'm not sure why they can't even get this right. Were lawyers and proofreaders barred from looking at this ridiculous mess? Pathetic.

Working with Holy See towards common goals

I found very peculiar Enda Kenny’s insistence last Wednesday that the government was not for turning with regard to its decision to shut Ireland’s embassy to the Holy See, merely conceding that its stance might change if Rome were to relax its rules regarding the housing of embassies.

It’s as though the government doesn’t understand that that the point of an embassy is not to flatter the state or body to which it’s accredited, but to serve the country it represents. If Ireland’s interests are best served by having an embassy to the Holy See, there is no justification for not furthering our national interests because we don’t like the Vatican’s house rules.

The Taoiseach’s comments seemed especially ironic given that they came within a day of Baroness Warsi, the Muslim co-Chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, having led a delegation to the Vatican where she outlined the importance of the UK’s diplomatic relationship with the Holy See.

Hailing the Holy See’s vast global reach, she explained that it made perfect sense for London and Rome to work together “to promote democracy, to fight for human rights, to encourage fair and responsible trade, to tackle climate change, and to help build stable nations.”

It’s hardly surprising that Britain should seek to realise her interest in areas of such immense global importance by building on her relationship with the Holy See in order to benefit the whole world. Baroness Warsi said that it was Britain’s hope that other countries would be inspired to work with the Holy See in a similar way, acting together in areas of common interest so that the global reach of the Catholic Church could further serve the common good.

Amplifier

This is often forgotten in discussions about whether or not Ireland should have a specific embassy for the Holy See; we understand that Rome is a superb listening post, but too frequently ignore how it can be an even more powerful amplifier. Ireland is a small country, but Rome can give us a big voice; we should be glad that Britain is seeking to remind us of this.

The rest of Baroness Warsi’s speech, engaging with the Pope’s Westminster Hall speech of September 2010, has proven far more contentious.

Addressing a throng of dignitaries Benedict XVI had spoken of freedom of conscience, the relationship of faith and reason, the need for ethical foundations for economic activity, and the vital contribution religion makes to civil discourse. In particular he warned against the marginalisation of religion in public life, and noted how religious bodies need to be free to act in accord with their own principles if they are to be empowered to serve society at large.

Baroness Warsi said she’d heeded these words, and that in order to encourage social harmony and ensure faith had its proper space in the public sphere, people need to feel stronger and more confident in their religious identities. Arguing that nations should not deny their religious heritage, she proclaimed that “Europe needs to be more confident in its Christianity”.

This might seem a strange line from a Muslim, but it’s worth remembering that the Jewish Jonathan Sacks had said something very similar only two months ago. Speaking in Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said: “When a civilisation loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children, and their children not yet born, we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice. We must help Europe recover its soul.”

Explaining how she had chosen to send her own daughter to be educated in a Christian school, knowing that she would be free to follow her faith there, Baroness Warsi went on to comment on how religious faith drives and inspires good works throughout the world.

Confident

Citing the examples of Irish nuns teaching in Pakistani Muslim communities and the response of organisations such as Caritas International to such tragedies as the Haitian earthquake and the East African famine, she recognised such ultimate enactments of the common good as expressions of strong and confident religious faith.

Stressing that such confidence in who we are and what we believe is necessary to guarantee openness and acceptance of others, she warned that the confident affirmation of religion was under threat in a variety of ways, notably from well-intentioned liberals and from those she described as “anti-religionists” who use a language of “secularist intolerance” in an attempt to eradicate religion from culture and the public square.

Leaving aside how I think true secularism allows faith a valuable space in public debate, I don’t see that our confidence should really be shaken by faith-denying devotees of militant secularism, however intolerant.

Puritanical atheists may be loud of voice, but they are very few in number. On the same day as Baroness Warsi’s speech, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science published the results of a survey finding that only 6 per cent of people in the UK disbelieve in God. Britain’s National Secular Society has no more members than the British Sausage Appreciation Society. Fewer people have paid to join Atheist Ireland than worship in my home parish on a typical Sunday.

Grandstanding gadflies like John Colgan and Clive Bone may irritate, but in themselves they’re of little import. The DPP is bound to dismiss as vexatious Colgan’s complaint that a homily by Bishop Philip Boyce constituted incitement to hatred, while contrary to how the National Secular Society has spun the decision, the English High Court only supported on technical grounds Bone’s case against Bideford Town Council starting meetings with prayers.

With regard to Mr Bone’s substantive argument that his human rights were being compromised by having to sit through others’ prayers, Mr Justice Ouseley was dismissive: “I cannot see that his freedom of religion, thought or conscience is infringed by the degree of embarrassment he feels, which is no more than is inherent in the exercise by the others of their freedom to manifest their religious beliefs, and his freedom to stay without participating or to leave. It is their freedom which would be infringed were he right.”

-- From The Irish Catholic, 23 February 2012

Ireland's Grey Lady is long past her prime...

It seems Patsy McGarry’s up to his old tricks again. Hardly a column of his goes by without me staring in astonishment. I know I should be used to it by now, but I'm hope over experience personified; it means I spend a lot of my life in a state of profound disappointment.

Look at today’s, and start with the title.

‘Lack of Vatican Co-operation over Child Abuse led to Closure of Embassy’

Interesting, isn’t it? It seems Patsy has embraced the growing consensus that rejects the Irish Government’s claim that economic motives were behind the decision to shut the embassy to the Holy See.

Granted, I don’t think that’s quite what he says in the column, but he’s not far off it, and Patsy’s editor can be forgiven for thinking that was his point. After all, columnists rarely get to decide the titles that head their work; this would have been an editorial decision. Of course, that invites the question of whether the Irish Times editorial team thinks the Government are lying. 

Patsy, as you’d expect, isn’t happy that people aren’t pleased about this. Perhaps he doesn’t see the value in the State having a real diplomatic presence in one of the nodal points of global diplomacy. Perhaps he doesn’t think the State should be seeking to enlist the help of the Holy See and some of the world’s largest NGO’s in achieving our supposed foreign policy aims regarding development, debt relief, conflict resolution, justice, and the environment.  Perhaps he just doesn’t care. 

It’s nonsense for Patsy to wheel out Malta as an example of a country that doesn’t have a resident embassy to the Holy See; he might be right, but only if he thinks our ambitions shouldn’t exceed those of a country barely a third of the size of County Louth and with far fewer people than County Cork.

Criminality?

Undermining our global diplomatic aims is fully justified, Patsy seems to be saying, because the Holy See undermined two Irish national investigations into criminality in the Irish Church. 

He’s referring to the two Murphy reports, of course, into how allegations of clerical child abuse were handled by the institutions of the Church and the State in the Archdiocese of Dublin between 1975 and 2004 and in the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009.

If you’ve read the reports even half as thoroughly as me, you’re probably blinking in astonishment.  Was either the Dublin Report or the Cloyne Report an investigation of criminality? If so, why on earth haven’t there been any prosecutions of the various bishops, priests, policemen, or staff of the national health service who the reports described as mishandling abuse allegations*

Is Patsy saying that these were investigations into criminality, and that no evidence of criminality was found? Is that the Irish Times’ line on this? 

The Cloyne Report doesn’t even consider the question of whether the law of the land was broken. With reference to the Church, the Murphy Commission examined whether abuse allegations received by the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009 were handled in regard to the diocese’s own internal rules.  Internal rules, mind, not the law of the land. Criminality wasn’t under investigation into any sense.

If McGarry genuinely believes that it was, and if the Irish Times does likewise, then I think it’s time to acknowledge that the title ‘Ireland’s Newspaper of Record’ is up for grabs.

Myths about Rome...

Aside from falsely claiming that the Murphy investigations were investigations of criminality, McGarry goes on to repeat a couple of long-discredited canards. 

Firstly we hear of how the Holy See refused to cooperate with the Murphy Commission's Dublin inquiry. As has been established for some time, the Holy See did nothing of the sort. The Commission wrote to Rome asking for assistance, and Rome contacted the State asking for communications on this matter to go through the usual diplomatic channels.

Accepting that the Holy See was fully entitled to ask that this request be handled properly rather than in an ad hoc way, the State informed the Murphy Commission of Rome’s response, and the Commission decided not to pursue the matter. Rome subsequently asked the State whether its message had been passed on, and was told that it had been. 

Rome was quite willing to cooperate; it was the Murphy Commission that chose not to avail itself of whatever help Rome could offer. If Rome didn’t know that the Murphy Commission couldn’t use the normal channels because it was also investigating the State – a dubious assumption on the part of the Commission – this was because neither the Commission nor the State informed them of this. The fault, on this, lay entirely with us.

Then we hear of the Nunciature refusing to cooperate with the Cloyne inquiry. Nonsense again. Murphy wrote to the Nunciature asking for whatever documents it held on matters relating to abuse allegations in Cloyne. The Nunciature replied saying that it held no documents as it did not deal with such matters, but that the diocese would have all relevant data and was bound to comply with the law on this.

It’s completely true that the Nunciature doesn’t deal with abuse allegations, and thus couldn’t be of assistance in supplying documents. As for the diocese, the Cloyne Report acknowledges that unlike the HSE, it handed over everything, including legally privileged copies of documents that were sent to Rome.

That’s important to note, conspiracy theorists and paranoid anti-Catholics: Rome doesn’t have secret files on abuse cases; it has copies of files that are held in dioceses, and it only has them if the dioceses bother to send them to Rome. 

As the substance of both the Dublin and Murphy reports makes clear, for far too long, dioceses tended to avoid submitting anything in connection with abuse to Rome, preferring instead to handle or mishandle allegations at a local level. 

The Cloyne Report mentions only a handful of allegations ever being passed on to Rome, all bar one of those being submitted in the month before Bishop John Magee, after a quiet private discussion with then then Nuncio, ‘resigned’. The only report submitted to Rome before this – which happened to be in connection with the only Cloyne priest ever found guilty of any form of sexual abuse, for which he received a two-year suspended sentence – is dealt with comprehensively in the Report because the diocese cooperated fully, as the Nunciature had said it would.

How does McGarry characterise the actions of Rome in all this?

‘That was how the Holy See treated two inquiries set up by our government to investigate the gravest of abuses of thousands of Irish children by priests. It ignored them.’

Firstly, it didn’t ignore the investigations. Secondly, neither inquiry investigated even one case of abuse. The remit of the two investigations was, quite simply, to investigate how abuse allegations had been handled. It had no remit whatsoever to consider whether any abuse actually took place.

 

It did, obviously, and on a terrible scale in Dublin as shown by the Dublin report. But the abuse of thousands of children? No, Patsy, not even close. Hell, despite all the claims in the Cloyne Report, only two priests cited in it were ever charged in court. One pleaded guilty to acts committed with a teenage boy, and received a two-year suspended sentence; the other has been acquitted twice.

There’s no sense in which the Holy See can credibly be said to have obstructed the Murphy investigations, neither of which were into criminality. Things have got to a bad place when a still fairly well-regarded paper perpetuates such myths and does so with such determination.

And there's the subtitle...

And then, of course, there’s the most poisonous part of the whole article, with Patsy saying that now the furore over Cloyne has died down, craven defenders of the indefensible  are crawling out of the woodwork:

‘Then there are the usual suspects, lay voices who make a living from defending the institutional church when it is safe to do so, when outrage is settling after the Cloyne report.

It was the same after the Ferns, Ryan and Murphy reports. Their immediate reaction is practised horror. Then, with time, they’re back to their slithering ways, diluting truth, minimising the wreckage, playing it all down.’

Ironically, much the same thing could be alleged about Patsy, to judge by his comments at the time Father Kevin Reynolds' innocence was established, hanging his head on behalf of his too keen media colleagues, only for him but moments later to stick on the same scratched record he's been playing for years. Indeed, the line about lay Catholics making a living from defending the Church is a bit rich coming from an agnostic who paints himself as an expert on the Church and who as far as I can see makes a living out of attacking it  Perhaps most importantly, it’s also demonstrable nonsense. 

Who could he possibly mean? David Quinn? John Waters? Breda O’Brien, who he so shamefully defamed on national television a couple of months back, such that he should count himself lucky he wasn’t taken to court? The staff of the Irish Catholic?

Patsy’s surely not referring to these, all of whom were prominent in the media at the time of the Cloyne Report, condemning child abuse in Ireland while at the same time advising people to read the Cloyne Report to see what it actually said, because an injustice was being done to the Church as a whole because of the actions of John Magee and Denis O’Callaghan. 

But who, then? Who are these ‘usual suspects’? They allegedly have form for doing this. They’re people, clearly, whose names we should all know.

Why wouldn't he have named them? 

Could the Irish Times legal people have advised him against doing so, as for him to have done so would surely have constituted defamation?

Was he just rattling something off at speed, with nobody at all particularly in mind?

I honestly can't figure this one out.

You might have a better explanation. If you do, I’d be glad to hear it.


-- An edited version of this was subsequently published in The Irish Catholic, 1 March 2012

_______________________________________________________________

* I'm not disputing the reality of the vast majority of allegations detailed in the reports, of course; what happened was monstrous, and it was spectacularly mishandled in disastrous ways, ways that made matters so much worse in Dublin, if not in Cloyne. I'm just saying that the reports weren't into the abuse itself, solely into how allegations were handled.

A Fine Country To Visit!

Back when I was doing my first degree I had the opportunity to do an enthralling course on European geographical awareness during the Middle Ages; aside from introducing me to the work of such wonderful scholars as Michael the Scot and Herman the German, it ensured that never again would I be so ignorant as to think that belief in a flat earth had ever been a part of mainstream Christian thinking and deepened my fascination with the Mongols and the Vikings.

Medieval travelogues played no small part in the course and it's been fun recently -- in connection with looking at Mongol warfare -- to pore afresh over the pages of William of Rubruck, John of Plano Carpine, Odoric of Pordenone, and that delightful old fraud Sir John Mandeville.

All of which has reminded me of some of the most scurrilously amusing passages from Marco Polo's Travels.

First up we have a passage upon which historians have been keen to cast aspersions; it refers to an area that Polo would have had to have detoured extravagantly to visit, and has a whiff of protesting too much about it:

'The province of Kamul, which used to be a kingdom, contains towns and villages in plenty, the chief town also being called Kamul. The province lies between two deserts, the Great Desert and a small on three days' journey in extent. The inhabitants are all idolaters and speak a language of their own. They live on the produce of the soil; for they have a superfluity of foodstuffs and beverages, which they sell to travellers who pass that way. They are a very gay folk, who give no thought to anything but making music, singing and dancing, and reading and writing according to their own usage, and taking great delight in the pleasures of the body.

I give you my word that if a stranger comes to a house here to seek hospitality he receives a very warm welcome. The host bids his wife do everything that the guest wishes. Then he leaves the house and goes about his own business and stays away two or three days. Meanwhile the guest stays with his wife in the house and does what he will with her, lying with her in one bed just as if he were his own wife; and they lead a gay life together. All the men of this city and province are thus cockolded by their wives; but they are not the least ashamed of it. And the women are beautiful and vivacious and always willing to oblige.'

Unlikely though it may sound, similar customs were recorded as having been practiced in nineteenth-century Afghanistan and Iran, so who knows...

Speaking of Tibet -- which then encompassed modern Sze-ch'wan and Yun-nan  to the east of the present Tibetan frontier -- the Venetian had this to say:

'This desolate country, infested by dangerous wild beasts, extends for twenty days; journey, without shelter or food except perhaps every third or fourth day, when the traveller may find some habitation where he can renew his stock of provisions.

Then he reaches a region with villages and hamlets in plenty and a few towns perched on precipitous crags. Here there prevails a marriage custom of which I will tell you.

It is such that no man would ever on any account take a virgin to wife. For they say that a woman is worthless unless she has had knowledge of many men. They argure that she must have displeased the gods, because if she enjoyed thed favour of their idols then men would desire her and consort with her. So they deal with their women-folk in this way.

When it happens that men from a foreign land are passing through this country and have pitched their tents and made a camp, the matrons from neighbouring villages and hamlets bring their daughters to these camps, to the number of twenty or forty, and beg the travellers to take them and lie with them.

So these choose the girls who please them best, and the others return home disconsolate. So long as they remain, the visitors are free to take their pleasure with the women and use them as they will, but they are not allowed to carry them off anywhere else.

When the men have worked their will and are ready to be gone, then it is the custom for every man to give to the woman with whom he has lain some trinket or token so that she can show, when she comes to marry, that she has had a lover.

In this way custom requires every girl to wear more than a score of such tokens hung round her neck to show that she has had lovers in plenty and plenty of men have lain with her. And she who has most tokens and can show that she has had most lovers and that most men have lain with her is the most highly esteemed and the most acceptable as a wife; for they say that she is the most favoured by the gods.

And when they have taken a wife in this way they prize her highly; and they account it a grave offence for any man to touch another's wife, and they all strictly abstain from such an act. So much, then, for this marriage custom. Obviously the country is a fine one to visit for a lad from sixteen to twenty-four.'

That's from the Penguin translation. It's worth it for the last line, I feel, which the translation used by Project Gutenburg renders with even more enthusiasm: 'Now I have related to you this marriage custom as a good story to tell, and to show what a fine country that is for young fellows to go to!'

Yes, as with Herodotus, it's the sexist quip at the end that really rounds the story off. Did this ever actually happen? 

We've no idea. That's the problem with Marco Polo. He was telling strange stories from far away places. He could have been making half of it up, or passing on tales he'd heard himself. It wasn't as if his audience was in a position to check, after all.

I'm looking forward to looking at some earlier writers again soon enough. Einhard, Bede, Gregory of Tours, and the supremely snide diplomat Liutprad of Cremona, just to start with. Not for a while, though. Other jobs need doing.

That said, if you're good I'll grace with some Mandeville before too long. You'll like him.