First Things: English Law and Lesbianism
August 23, 2006

Joseph Pearce writes:
The trouble with thinking of home is that it’s not always very pleasant. At least if one is an English exile thinking of his homeland. There is an odor of decay surrounding the British body politic and a sense that the memory of a living European culture is in an advanced stage of decomposition. It is, therefore, comforting to look beyond the decomposing present to the healthy vitality of England’s living past. That’s why I spend so much of my time in the presence of Shakespeare, Hopkins, Newman, and Chesterton. How alive these men are compared with the living death of sin and cynicism in the ascendant today. It is, therefore, a small but nourishing crumb of comfort to learn that a senior judge in today’s England has upheld the morality that Shakespeare, Chesterton et al would have taken for granted.

I am referring to Sir Mark Potter, the president of the Family Division, the senior judge of family law in England, who passed a judgment in the High Court earlier this month that amounted to a ringing endorsement of traditional marriage. He was judging the case of a lesbian couple who had been “married” under Canadian law three years ago and who were seeking to have their union validated under English law. Giving judgment, Sir Mark said that common law had always recognized marriage as the voluntary union of a man and a woman. Anyone challenging this faced the “insurmountable hurdle” of legislation passed in 1973, which says that a marriage is void if “the parties are not respectively male and female.” the rest