Unmentionable question
Sir: Peter Hitchens is no doubt right that the collapse of marriage among heterosexuals is a more serious matter than extending marriage to same-sex couples (‘The gay marriage trap’, 17 March). The damage to the family started with the removal of stigma from having children out of wedlock and divorce on demand; and the redefinition came with same-sex adoption, which in human terms was more radical than same-sex marriage, because there were no long-term studies of what the psychological effect on the adopted children would be. Beyond the issue of the effect on society of the extension of gay rights, however, is the question as to whether conjugal sex and gay sex are morally equivalent. I suspect that most of those who oppose same-sex marriage believe that they are not but dare not say so for fear of being deemed bigoted, judgmental and homophobic. Yet this has been the view of the religious and irreligious alike from antiquity until the present day.
Piers Paul Read
London W6
Above politics
Sir: Hugo Rifkind is surprised at the influence of religion in the gay marriage debate (17 March) but that is because he misunderstands its contribution. The Church is not a political organisation, and does not ‘oppose’ gay marriage as a lobby group. It just asks that our state should recognise what every child recognises: that men and women are different, and that only men and women can be married.
James McEvoy
Chertsey, Surrey
Too philosophical
Sir: The problem with Roger Scruton’s cursory critique of neuroscience and neuroimaging (‘Brain drain’, 17 March) was that it was all philosophy and no science, underpinned by its unfortunate failure to include any primary neuroscience or neuroimaging research to support its suppositions. There is a good critique to be made of neuroscience and imaging — the best is made by scientists themselves who publish fairly sober, hypothesis-driven research and make few claims beyond the constraints of their hypothesis-testing. The research is usually misrepresented and over-glamorised by journalism; a review of this misrepresentation appears in one of my books, for those interested. But really, the good intelligent readers of The Spectator deserve better than this melange of trivia and hand-me-downs.
Dr G.N. Martin
Reader in Psychology, Middlesex University
Sir: Roger Scruton’s assault on neuroscience smacks of self-interest. As he recently told Andrew Marr, ‘All the brain-imaging stuff is a kind of apology for philosophy conducted by people who’ve never understood a philosophical question’ — an opinion that might earn him a post in a philosophers’ trade union. Of our vast and growing store of knowledge of brain and behaviour, almost all is owed to psychology and neuroscience. But what does philosophy have to show for two-and-a-half millennia of epistemological speculation? Lest we forget, it was philosophy that spawned the tyranny of scholasticism, a philosopher who dreamt up the idiocy of the blank slate, philosophers who refused to view the evidence in Galileo’s telescope, certain they’d see nothing they’d not already deduced… Philosophers have cost mankind dearly, and all who believe that experiment crushed sophistry and rhetoric must remain vigilant.
John Bunyard
Kent
In bad odour
Sir: I sympathised with Stephen Pollard when reading of his encounters with BO at the Royal Opera and fidgety kids at the Albert Hall (‘Theatre of rudeness’, 10 March) — but was disappointed that he seems to have done nothing about either of these pestilences. He needs, in future, to perhaps take a leaf out of the book of a doughty American matron I was sitting across the aisle from on a flight back from Rio the other day. At the end of the flight, when, in his haste to join the queue for the exit, her neighbour in the window seat made a clumsy attempt to climb over her, she was heard by most of the rest of the aircraft to howl, ‘For the last 13 hours I’ve been assaulted by your foul breath — and now, for good measure, you’ve trodden on my toe.’ One hopes that the offender, who looked appropriately sheepish, was shamed into paying a visit to a dental hygienist before he caught his flight home.
Martin Gascoigne
London W12
Bats vs vicars
Sir: You may wish to advise the Rt Revd Michael H.G. Mayes (Letters, 3 March) not to shout too loudly about his solution for dealing with bats. Admitting that you have managed to rid your place of worship of ‘the little monsters’ by utilising nasty chemicals may get you into trouble. Perhaps the Rt. Revd should have a think about how him upstairs may feel about some of his defenceless creatures being harmed. I personally think that bats serve a far more useful purpose than vicars. I suggest the Revd does a little reading around the subject and maybe enlighten himself about the benefits of bats to the wider environment.
Tristan Norton
Winchester
Airing a grievance
Sir: Charles Moore is ungallant; worse, he is becoming boring. His weekly pot-shots at the presenters of Breakfast on Radio 3 (notably Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Sarah Walker and Clemency Burton-Hill) have a smirking quality that I dislike. These women have been up since before dawn and make up much of the linking material as they go along. They have been told by their producer to conceal the erudition they display later in the day in order to seem ‘approachable’ to the commuting and school-running audience. Of course they sometimes say silly things — we all do.
George Pownall
London SW4
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