OVER the past week the meaning of marriage has been attacked from two directions at once, and neither attacker troubled to hide it.
The first came from the therapist’s chair. On July 10 the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the largest body of its kind in the country, directed its members back to its guidance on gender, sexuality and relationships. Open that guidance and you find infidelity quietly rebranded. ‘Secret non-monogamy’ – ‘affairs or infidelity’, in plainer words – is called ‘a relationship model’, one the document rates ‘at least as common as monogamy, if not more so’. The counsellor is told that ‘the goal of therapy is not to stop the non-monogamous person’, and is encouraged to help clients ‘normalise how incredibly difficult lifelong monogamy is‘.
Read that again. A husband who has broken his vows, or is minded to, may now sit before a professional and be met not with a call to faithfulness but with reassurance that faithfulness was an unreasonable expectation all along. The single promise at the heart of every wedding, to forsake all others, has been reclassified by the caring professions as a matter of taste.
There is an irony worth pausing on. This same association is a signatory to the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy, by which the counselling professions forbid any attempt to change a client’s sexual orientation. The profession that will not let a therapist touch a person’s orientation is content to let one wave through the abandonment of a marriage. Desire is sovereign, it seems, unless the desire is to keep one’s vows.
The second attack came from Parliament. Today the House of Lords gives a second reading to Lord Marks’s Cohabitation Rights Bill, which would grant couples who have merely lived together much of what marriage confers – a financial settlement when they part, a share of the estate when one dies, an insurable interest in the other’s life – after three years, or sooner if there is a child. The reasoning is not concealed. If living together delivers what marriage delivers, marriage is left with nothing of its own.
You might wonder why Lord Marks is pressing a private Bill while his own Government consults on the very same question. That is the tell. The Bill is not the Government’s, but his, reintroduced session after session since 2013, and it runs deliberately alongside the Ministry of Justice consultation brightly titled ‘A fairer end to relationships‘. Two routes, one destination. Ministers protest that they will keep marriage a distinct institution, yet a thing is not kept distinct by handing its privileges to those who decline it.
Set these beside a third measure and the design is unmistakable. The Government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill would create a criminal offence, carrying up to five years in prison, to prohibit a therapy that the professions – the BACP among them – already prohibit. No law is needed to ban what is already banned. A law is needed to reach what is not yet a crime: the sermon, the counsel a believer freely asks for, the honest word between husband and wife. Genuine abuse, coercion and violence, has been criminal for generations. After eight years of promising this Bill, ministers have yet to name one victim the existing law could not already protect.
Stand back and the three move as one. A profession that will not defend fidelity. A Parliament invited to rub out the line between marriage and cohabitation. A criminal law drafted to chill the very speech by which marriage is taught. There has seldom been a more sustained assault on the plain meaning of man-woman marriage, and most of it has arrived inside a single fortnight.
None of it began this month. The redefinition of marriage in 2013 was sold as a widening of the door. What it did was cut, in law, the settled tie between a child and the mother and father who made her, for that tie holds only while the words husband and wife, mother and father, still carry a fixed meaning. Loosen the definition at the centre and everything downstream loosens with it – the therapist’s ethics, the cohabitant’s claim, the draftsman’s pen. These are not three accidents. They are one idea, patiently pressed, that marriage is nothing in particular and may therefore be made into anything at all.
The answer is neither despair nor silence. Man-woman marriage has outlasted every civilisation that fancied it could improve on it, and it will outlast this one. It will do so, though, only while those of us who still know what it is are willing to say so, plainly and often, for as long as the saying stays free – but more so if it doesn’t.
