Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross]

My Lords, I have listened with great respect and interest to the passion and concerns that arise from the redefinition of marriage set out in this Bill. I have spent the past few months researching a television proposal on the history of various Christian institutions, and one of the main areas of my research was the institution of marriage. As has been mentioned by many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, it is clear that over the 2,000 year-long history of Christian marriage it has been open to continual redefinition both by the church and the state.

I have gone back to the early church, in which marriage was seen as a contract between a man and a woman. It was adorned by Christ’s presence and commended by St Paul. But for nearly 1,000 years after Christ, there was no such thing as a church wedding; marriage remained a civil ceremony, even for Christians. The church recognised only baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments, which were performed inside the church, while marriage was often performed at a slight distance from the church building. I found proof of this in an English medieval liturgical text, the Sarum Rite, which suggested that marriage should take place in the church porch, rather than in front of the altar, as happens in church weddings today.

The big change came in the 11th century, when reforms initiated by Pope Gregory VII meant that the church started to take control and redefine marriage in many different ways. Most importantly, it laid down that marriage was now a sacrament, an eternal union of a man and a woman divinely dispensed, one of seven sacraments. The rules of marriage were changed, laying down in canon law that it was not possible to marry within seven degrees of consanguinity and even prohibiting marrying godparents or their children without the church’s dispensation.

The church control of marriage broke down when the reformation swept through northern Europe in the 16th century. The protestant reformers once again saw marriage as a contract. In England, marriage was no longer regarded as a biblical sacrament. In the Church of England’s 25th article of religion, this status was reserved only for baptism and the Supper of the Lord. A marriage was administered by the parties to the marriage, with the church merely blessing it.

In Archbishop Cranmer’s prayer book of 1549, the first prayer book in English, marriage was ordained for the procreation and nurture of children, and as a remedy against sin—but very significantly, also, for the,

“mutual society, help and comfort”,

of man and wife. In other words, for the first time in Christian liturgy, marriage was defined as about the happiness of two individuals.

These principles of marriage have been continually redefined over the last two centuries by both church and State. The supposedly lifelong nature of marriage was redefined by the state in 1857, with the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act. Marriage was no longer eternal; it could end in divorce. The church’s control of marriage was broken by establishing a central divorce court in London unattached to the church. At the time, this change in the nature of marriage outraged many Anglicans, and some prominent clergy left the Church of England in protest, but divorce is now a feature in Anglican life. It is not just the state which has redefined marriage; so has the church. The 1549 prayer book made it clear that the wife was unequal to her husband, but this part of the marriage contract was redefined in 1927, when the Church of England introduced an alternative marriage service. It removed the wife’s vow of obedience in the marriage service and proposed instead that she should now make the same vow as her husband, to honour and love her spouse. But the ruling stirred huge debate in the national assembly of the church, with opposition being led by Lord Hugh Cecil and Athelstan Riley. The latter declared that “There can be no equality in matters of sexual morality between men and women as it pleased God to create a profound inequality between men and women”. This was said just before women were given universal suffrage in 1928.

As has been mentioned by many noble Lords, the stipulation in the 1549 prayer book that marriage should be for the procreation and nurture of children was also redefined at the beginning of the last century by changes in the Church of England’s view on the use of contraception in marriage at a series of Lambeth conferences. In the 1908 conference, they referred to contraception with repugnance as “an evil which jeopardises the purity of family life”. In 1920, the bishops at the conference still expressed their grave concern at the spread of,

“theories and practices hostile to the family”.

They made no attempt to lay down rules to meet every case. But by 1930, there was an entirely different mood. The Lambeth conference acknowledged that there would be occasions when,

“a clearly felt obligation to limit or avoid parenthood”,

and,

“a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence”,

would justify contraception in the light of Christian principles. Despite much principled opposition, the Church of England had agreed a direct connection between contraception and accepting that sex within marriage was not only for the purpose of procreation.

In 2009, the Quakers made their own great leap of redefinition set out in this Bill. They agreed, as many noble Lords have already mentioned, to support same-sex marriage at their meetings. It seems that marriage has undergone many redefinitions over its huge history. Many were fiercely opposed at the time, but they went ahead anyway.

Looking to the future, I picked up on the concern of my noble friend Lord Dear, that this redefinition will lead to an increase of homophobic attacks, as has been happening in France, so I looked at what has happened in other countries which have introduced a same-sex marriage Act. Sweden did so in May 2009 and, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, which is an agency of the Swedish Ministry of Justice, in 2008—that is a year before the Act was passed—there were 1,046 attacks, but in 2010, there were 750, a decrease of 28%. And this in a country which is becoming less tolerant as the riots across its cities last month have shown.

Considering the many redefinitions of marriage that we have seen over its long history, I think that this new redefinition should be debated by this House. I therefore reject the amendment.