Marriage and morality in politics

There is a saying - what is considered immoral today will be illegal tomorrow. This flies in the face of the direction most people think law goes in. They think that modernisation is a process of liberalisation, where things that were once disapproved of become more and more acceptable. But this is missing the bigger picture of why things are considered immoral.

In pre-modern times the state was small. It didn't do much beyond sending soldiers around fighting wars to enrich the rulers. There weren't many laws at all. Sometimes a ruler would pass a lot of laws, but usually these were not widely enforced beyond the palace gates. However, as societies developed, the rulers would become more and more powerful. Institutions grew to supplement the state such as guilds, which would make and enforce bye-laws to regulate trade. More complex societies required more and more laws regulating ever greater fields of human life.

What is law about? In essence, it's how you treat people. What is morality about? Likewise, it's how you behave towards people. Essentially they are the government and the individual each addressing the same issue. Politics is the interaction in the middle.

What about, some may ask, the modern trend towards repealing laws against specific sexual behaviour? The answer is these are very culturally specific and related to what the precise law should be. If someone chooses to interpret it law abandoning personal relationships, they're wrong, family law has be growing continuously more complicated even whilst laws against specific sex practises have been repealed.

If you open up a Bible or a Quran and look for a passage condemning paedophilia or marital rape, you won't find one. Yet today we take for granted that these are heinous crimes which law must condemn. Morality evolves - even though societies go through phases of more permissiveness and more conservatism, the over all direction is towards a continuously more thorough moral system, enforced by ever more sophisticated laws to best reflect the seriousness of the breach of ethics which they address.

Onto the matter of the debate on marriage and specifically the demands for the government to categorise same sex partnerships as marriage. Many commentators lazily put this into the brackets of an equality issue, regarding it as getting rid of a law against gay people marrying, which they think is part of a trend towards liberalisation, separating law and morality. But this is the opposite of what is happening. They are bringing morality further into people's sex lives. Whereas traditional marriage is based upon heterosexual intercourse, and so is a legal framework for heterosexual couples, now gay issue campaigners are bringing this legal framework into the sex lives of homosexuals.

So what about the issue of whether civil partnerships are referred to as 'marriage', which is treated as an equality issue by campaigners? Law is meant to reflect the underlying relationships between people. In the case of laws about drugs, food and sex, this is based upon the underlying biological reality. And in the case of sex, the reality is that by definition heterosexuals have sex in a manner which monogamous homosexuals do not desire. Thus there is a very significant difference. In terms of family life: conception, pregnancy and child rearing, most heterosexual couples carry out these activities in a materially different manner from gay couples - most evidently in the fact that the gay couple are never both the natural parents of the children, whilst in traditional marriages, the wife bearing her husbands children is often central to how they experience their relationship.

The campaign to call them the same thing is a part of the process of ever more intrusive laws - it is a form of social engineering which seeks to convince people gender difference does not exist. This must be its downfall. As the saying goes, 'There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.' Homosexuals are not a disadvantaged minority, quite the opposite, they are on average wealthier and better educated than heterosexuals, and the strength of the lobby pushing for gay marriage shows the power of their political clout. However forcing this equivalence will harm the ability of the legal form of marriage for heterosexuals and partnerships for homosexuals to reflect the needs of each group of people. This is the essence of the inequality and bad policy it represents.

Progress requires that legal institutions, like morality and ethics, accurately represent the facts of people's lives and experiences. Tying together marriage for heterosexuals with gay civil partnerships does not do this, and so people who believe in equality and an ethical legal system should oppose it.