With gay marriage will come gay divorce. If you look at civil partnership dissolutions, the numbers have multiplied more than ten times in four years, though this rate of increase will presumably level off. (The level is still much lower than that of heterosexual marriage.) What will be the grounds for gay divorce? The only legal ground for the dissolution of a civil partnership is that it has ‘broken down irretrievably’. You cannot, as in heterosexual marriage, cite non-consummation or adultery, although ‘unfaithfulness may be recognised as a form of unreasonable behaviour’. It is understandable that this is so, since consummation — viewed by both civil and religious law as the definitive act of marriage because it keeps the human race in existence — can have no such significance in the relationship of homosexuals, and so is indefinable. At present, the legal definition of adultery ‘involves two adults of the opposite sex’. If we have gay marriage, will this be changed? If so, what act would be considered adulterous? If not, how would the equality which reformers seek have been established? Once you consider the grounds for dissolution, you see that the thing being dissolved is not the same for gays as for straights: it strains common sense to call it marriage.
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All the reformers are left with, then, is the ‘commitment’ argument. This is very strong, in that the commitment of one person to another is one of the best things in human life. But why, if we are expanding the types of commitment which society rewards, should the reform be limited to sexual commitment? It is quite common, for instance, for unmarried sisters to spend their entire lives together. Their commitment (I am not talking about incest here) is probably more unbreakable than that of the average married couple. The same is true of some mothers who continue to live with their grown-up sons. Why are these commitments not singled out for praise by David Cameron and privileged in law?
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Perhaps, like so many things nowadays, it is all really to do with tax lobbying. The government does not like extending tax exemptions to new groups, but it is much more frightened of the gay lobby than of unmarried sisters, so it appeases the former. A friend of mine speculates that, if gay marriage comes in, it would be a good idea for him to marry his son. He would do so not because he has any incestuous desires towards the young man, but because of the need for inheritance-tax planning. He rightly points out that there can be no logical reason, if homosexual marriage is permitted, why fathers and sons should not marry one another. After all, there is no chance of their giving birth to deformed children.
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In my trade, everything depends on how you present evidence. If — like most media — you had studied only the press release of the latest evidence about British drinking collected by the Office for National Statistics, you would have concluded, as the headline writers did, that the big story was that older people were drinking more than ever. In fact, the ONS report, which is typically thorough, shows that, from 2005 to 2010, drinking per head among more than 20 different social groups declined in all but one of them. The ONS press release headline said ‘Over 45s three times as likely to drink almost every day’, without saying as likely as who. In fact, drinking by the average adult has fallen by about 20 per cent in these five years. Binge drinking (defined as more than eight units in one day for men and six for women) fell in all age groups except the over 65s, where it rose by 1 per cent. The fall in binge drinking is most marked — 8 per cent for men and 10 per cent for women — among 16-to-24-year-olds. At present there is a fierce campaign to persuade the public that there is an ‘epidemic’ of drunkenness which must be controlled by jacking up the cost. There is no such epidemic, although there may well be bad licensing arrangements, poor policing and poor parenting which encourage crowds of young drunks to make town centres miserable on weekend evenings. The solution of minimum alcohol pricing [see last week’s Notes], reviving the preposterous medieval notion of the just price, is a state-sponsored punishment for the offence of being young and poor.
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‘Special needs’ is the official educational phrase used to cover a wide variety of disability, mental and physical. What are those needs? A key point to understand about them, touchingly illustrated in Rosa Monckton’s television programme this week, Letting Go, is that they do not diminish with adulthood. State-backed provision until 16, or even till 19, is not too bad. Then it becomes much more hit-and-miss. My sister Charlotte, whose book George and Sam, about her two autistic sons, has just been updated, and reissued by Penguin, faces this problem. George is 22, Sam 20. She says that the gains made at school can easily be lost, and argues that adulthood for people like George (the higher-functioning of the two) is more likely to be achieved at 25 than 19: government policy should recognise this. Watching Letting Go, I was struck by the effect of popular culture’s ambitions. A Down’s Syndrome boy called Jack longed to be famous and live in Las Vegas. ‘I just want my dreams to come true,’ he said, repeating what he must often have heard on television. It must be better to encourage children to think that they can do things than to warn them that they can’t. This is a cultural improvement — look at the Paralympics. But often, nonetheless, they really can’t, and this fact must, somehow, be faced. In a postscript, Charlotte writes that George wants to become a zookeeper, but adds, ‘I hope, for the safety of the animals and the general public, that his ambition is never realised.’
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Radio Twee. Sarah Walker, in conversation with the weather presenter Siân Lloyd on Essential Classics: ‘Siân, you’ve talked a lot about your passion for books. That must have stood you in good stead at university’.
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