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Gay News: Conservative MP Edward Leigh has criticised the Government's plans to allow gay couples to marry in church
Edward Leiigh MP
Tory MP slams gay marriage plans
16 February 2011
The MP for Gainsborough,
Under new reforms unveiled by Home Secretary Theresa May on Thursday, gay couples will be allowed to have their civil partnerships in churches and other places of worship.
Plans are also underway to redefine civil marriage as no longer just a union between a man and a woman.
Although Ms May stressed that no church would be legally obliged to host a civil partnership ceremony against its will, Mr Leigh said that sooner or later it was inevitable that a church would be sued for refusing.
“Even if our own courts stand firm, we can place little faith in the European Court of Human Rights,” Mr Leigh said. “It will be argued, with some justification, that it is irrational and confusing for some churches to permit this and others not.
He went on to say that he was “astonished and disappointed” that the Conservative-led government should be considering whether to do away with traditional marriage “which has always been between a man and a woman.
“Once we have departed from the universally understood framework of marriage, there is no logical reason why the new alternative institution should be limited to two people. Why not three? Or thirty-three?”
He added: “Same-sex couples already have all the rights of marriage in the form of civil partnership. Why must they also have the language of marriage?
“No doubt because it is an important symbol to them. But it is also an important symbol to many other people. Must the religious and cultural heritage of toe whole nation be overturned to suit the demands of a minority even of the gay community itself?”
“We should also be concerned about liberty. This is all part of a process whereby debate and honest language is manipulated and suppressed by a kind of Newspeak. In recent years people who say things gay rights groups do not like have often found themselves being reported to the police. If the government presses ahead and replaces marriage with a unisex institution, what is the future for those who say they do not believe a man can have a husband or a woman a wife?”
Mr Leigh, who is a Roman Catholic, was a supporter of Section 28 which prohibited the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, and was an opponent of the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 which gave gay and lesbian couples the right to enter into legally recognised civil unions.
