Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Croydon North (Steve Reed). I feel a certain distress about how the debate has been managed over the past six months and the pressure that has been put on so many of my colleagues by pressure groups and Churches who should have known better than to deploy such tactics. I feel that I have been living with a false sense of security after the legislative changes of the past decade. I am indebted to the Prime Minister not only for the Bill, but for the changes he has brought about within my party, which have led to my own election and that of many others and changed the face of the parliamentary party. As a result of the debate over the past six months, we may have gone two steps forward, but I fear we have also gone one step back. The modernisation of the Conservative party is not yet complete.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

Has the hon. Lady, like me, been particularly angered and frustrated by the tactics of the campaign director of Coalition for Marriage, who has sent out e-mails urging people to write to their MPs saying:

“You will be remembered if you vote for this Bill. You will be held to account for it. We will tell your friends and family and we will not vote for you.”?

This is a free vote. Members should be voting with their conscience, as a free vote requires, not on the basis of threats to electoral prospects.

[Margot James]

The hon. Lady makes the point far better than I could have done. The Coalition for Marriage and some Churches have deliberately and consistently misinterpreted the Government’s intentions by pretending that we were forcing Churches to marry same-sex couples. That was never the intention of the Government, and I and other colleagues would never have supported the Bill had it been so.

Belatedly, only this weekend, the Church of England has finally admitted that it is not realistic or likely that Churches will be forced to conduct same-sex weddings. It is so easy to say that now, when practically every person I meet who does not follow political deliberations in great detail has said to me about the Bill, “Oh, it’s about weddings in churches for gay people, isn’t it?” That is the misapprehension that many of my constituents who are opposed to the Bill have laboured under, including members of my own constituency association. I would like to put on record my appreciation of those individuals who have treated me with courtesy and respect such that I can, in conscience, support the Bill this evening without fear or favour. Many of them, however, believe that we are legislating for gay weddings in church. We are not. I am satisfied by the advice of the Attorney-General that that is an infinitesimal possibility. We have heard about how nobody can legislate against a challenge in the courts, but case law in the European Court of Human Rights makes it infinitesimally unlikely that any such challenge would succeed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

No, I am certainly not. I was delighted to attend my hon. Friend’s wedding. The reason that I have just cited was applicable 351 years ago as well, but the Church of England service still applies.

Children are at the heart of marriage but they are barely mentioned in the Bill. It aims to open up the benefits of marriage to people who are excluded from it at the moment, but it does so at the price of taking away a significant part of the meaning of marriage. Children are the reason that marriage has always been so important. If it was purely about a loving relationship between two people, as the Minister suggested earlier, it would have been much less important than it has actually been. Does that matter? Yes, it does, because it is right for society to recognise—as marriage does—the value to all of us of the contribution of those who bring children into the world and bring them up. That is the ideal that the current definition of marriage reflects, and it would be a mistake to lose the value that that definition places on the creation and bringing up of children. In the end, it will be children who will lose out if we do that.

[Mrs Moon]

I am following my right hon. Friend’s argument about the importance of marriage for children. Is he suggesting that children should be adopted only by couples who are married, or that children with same-sex parents have a lesser right to have loving parents who are married?

[Stephen Timms]

I am not saying either of those things; I am simply making the point that it remains the ideal for the two parents who together created a child to bring up that child.

Legal equality was delivered, quite rightly, by the introduction of civil partnerships, and if there are weaknesses in those arrangements, they should be put right. In particular, I see no problem with same-sex unions being celebrated in places of worship where congregations want to do so. A same-sex couple can have the same wish to affirm and to have affirmed a lifelong exclusive commitment as a man and a woman getting married, and we should value that and be willing to recognise and celebrate it. This Bill, however, affirms not that same-sex unions are equal with marriages, but rather that they are the same as marriages, when in reality they are not: they are different. I think we will be poorer if we adopt a watered-down definition of marriage based on two aims from the Church of England’s list instead of all three.