Marriage is a blessing, not a fortress that must be stormed

The demand for gay equality in Britain threatens to undermine our most valuable institution, writes Cristina Odone in a commentary from London.

Is marriage a contract or a sacrament? It's a question that cost Thomas More his head, and could cost Britain's coalition government a significant number of votes. The nation's most senior Catholic clergymen are asking their congregations to fight David Cameron's plans to legalise gay marriage, and Anglicans are mobilising under Dr George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. For their part, advocates of gay marriage will not countenance a U-turn on what they see as a crucial issue: they are attacking the "traditionalists" as "out of touch" and out of order.

The starting point for this debate, on both sides, is that marriage matters. Indeed, after decades of rejecting the institution as old-fashioned and patriarchal, women and men are both waking up to the fact that it makes overwhelming sense. Last year, 241,100 marriages were celebrated, up 3.4% on the year before - and polls show that the vast majority of cohabiting women would like to get married to their partners. The evidence is beyond dispute that it's good for children and good for spouses. A happiness survey carried out by the Government recently showed that heterosexual married couples were the happiest people in Britain.

But wait - if it's such a great institution, why shouldn't more people benefit from it? Supporters of gay marriage argue that it is precisely because marriage is the cornerstone of society that it should be more widespread. Marriage should be everywhere, cementing the bonds between grown-ups and the children they rear, laying the foundations without which romantic love or sizzling lust will collapse like a house of cards.

Yet traditional marriage is not simply a popular social institution; it is also a spiritual ideal. The state can tinker with the former. Indeed, it has already done so, by introducing civil marriages and, later, civil partnerships. But spiritual ideals fall outside the Government's remit.

When civil partnerships were introduced in 2004, I cheered. I knew gay couples who enjoyed a far happier union than some married heterosexuals I had come across. For the state to fail to recognise this struck me as unfair. When James had looked after Keith with unstinting dedication for 24 years, it was unjust that he should pay tax on the inheritance Keith had bequeathed him. When Paul and Sam had been inseparable since university, it seemed horrific that the hospital could bar Paul from Sam's bedside as he lay dying.

The Civil Partnership Act did away with such unfairness; today, more than 20,000 gay Britons enjoy the rights and responsibilities conferred by marriage. But the gay marriage lobby does not think this enough. Fairness is all very well: what they seek, however, is equality, including in terms of access to marriage. And those who oppose this, on whatever grounds, are accused of anti-gay propaganda. It doesn't matter that I've publicly urged the Catholic Church to recognise its debt to gays, or that I count Peter Tatchell as a hero and a friend: ever since I questioned the Coalition's plans to legalise gay marriage, in an article for The Daily Telegraph, I've been attacked as an unjust, homophobic and irrational clone of Rick Santorum.

Yet defending heterosexual marriage as an ideal is not simply about supporting the status quo. A gay couple may be equal to a straight one in the eyes of the law. But in the eyes of the Catholic Church, or evangelical Protestantism, or Islam, or most of Judaism? Marriage, for such communities (and even for many Anglicans), can join only man to woman. In fact, in many of these faiths, divorced men and women cannot aspire to marriage, either. The divorcee, like the homosexual, has fallen short of a spiritual ideal. This is painful, as I know first-hand: when I married a divorced man, I could not do so in church, or continue to take Communion at Mass. Mine is a painful situation, but not an unfair one: as a Catholic, I knew the rules.

The Government claims that its plans to legalise gay marriage will not affect religious institutions, only civil ones. But given that the gay marriage lobby seeks equality in this area, how long would it accept the ban on gays marrying in church or synagogue? It is bound to argue that exclusion from a religious ceremony amounts to discrimination, and will almost certainly campaign to force priests and vicars to celebrate gay marriages even if that goes against their heartfelt beliefs. Freedom of conscience will be sacrificed at the altar of a "right" that the Civil Partnership Act was supposed to have conferred years ago.

Church and government have long been at loggerheads over marriage: was it the domain of the parson or the squire? The tussle between these authorities, as Ferdinand Mount reveals in The Subversive Family, spurred impatient young men and women to tie the knot on their own - often without a single witness, let alone the blessing of their parish priest. Even in Victorian times, marriage as a private deal continued among the working classes: religious authorities such as the Committee on Religion and Morals of the Free Church would throw their hands in the air at the live-and-let-live attitude of those who ignored their warnings of children born out of wedlock, marriages ending in separation, and widespread adultery.

Relationships are just as messy, and just as flimsy, today: 80 per cent of couples cohabit before marriage, leaving them vulnerable to legal and bureaucratic nightmares involving inheritance, "palimony", and children's visiting rights. Divorce, which ends almost half of marriages, can mark the beginning of a traumatic relationship with your former partner, as can separation.

These untidy permutations bring home an important fact: marriage is anything but natural. As Darwin didn't dare say, marriage thwarts the masculine impulse toward promiscuity and the feminine self-interest in hooking up with the highest-status male. Left to our own devices, men and women would wander from relationship to relationship, having a child here, another one there, thinking of our own needs and satisfying our own desires. Marriage, at once divine and artificial, reins in our instincts and institutionalises our love. It requires collaboration, nurturing, a sense of duty and responsibility, self-sacrifice as well as the self-confidence to don billowing white tulle and waft down the aisle to Mendelssohn's Wedding March.

It's a tall order - so no wonder two grown-ups who commit to one another to the death need all the help they can get. That means both spiritual guidance and sustenance from religious authorities, and legal and fiscal support from secular ones. Sadly, this Government seems loath to hold out a hand. Tories were once stalwart supporters of traditional marriage; but this Prime Minister talks of making gay marriage legal and straight marriage costly. (Tax benefits are an incentive for couples, even with children, to live apart.) The one minister who champions heterosexual marriage, Iain Duncan Smith, has yet to see his proposal for a marriage tax break come into effect.

This is a terrible shame. Marriage may be a force for the good, but for some gay people, it has become a fortress they must storm. They argue that, in its present state, marriage discriminates and excludes. The ancient and much-loved edifice must be broken into - or simply broken.