Daily Mail, October 17 2002

The other day, I fell into conversation with a Labour peer about the proposal to allow cohabiting couples to adopt, which was thrown out by the House of Lords last night.

He and his colleagues had been bombarded, said this peer, by preposterous claims from Christian groups that cohabitation was much more unstable than marriage. When I replied that this was indeed the case, he launched into an astonishing tirade.

People who cohabited, he spluttered, were far braver than people who were married. He himself had left his wife of more than twenty years, and it was the bravest thing he had ever done.

He didn’t know a single married person who wasn’t playing around (he used a far cruder term) outside marriage. Not only that: every couple without exception who stayed married for a long time was in fact deeply miserable.

His remarks may have been eye-popping – such generalisations are, after all, demonstrably absurd -- but his broad approach is not unusual among politicians and the metropolitan intelligentsia, who treat arguments for sexual fidelity and the need to champion marriage as signs of incipient insanity.

To justify their own louche lifestyles – and often to expunge some terrible hatred or resentment buried deep in their own childhoods -- they use every opportunity to attack and destroy the very idea that marriage may be preferable or superior in any way.

Indeed, the campaign to allow cohabiting couples to adopt has very little to do with the welfare of children. It is instead the latest stage in the remorseless drive to undermine marriage by people who are determined to promote alternative lifestyles instead.

Most of the sound and fury about the adoption amendment has been about its provision that gay couples should be able to adopt. Opponents have therefore been predictably attacked as ‘homophobic’, the smear now routinely used to shut down debate by terrorising anyone who dares suggest a problem with the gay rights agenda.

In fact, the number of gay adoptive parents would always be miniscule. The real sting in this proposal is the signal it would give that heterosexual cohabitation is of equal value to marriage when it comes to the raising of children.

But this is simply not true. The proposal would not only act against the interests of adopted children but also cause more children in general to suffer a fractured family life.

For the growing belief that cohabitation is just ‘marriage without the bit of paper’ is simply wrong. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that the rise and rise of cohabitation is now the major factor driving ever upwards our disastrous proportion of fatherless children.

Although some cohabitations do last for decades, the number of cohabiting couples who stay together for the duration of their children’s upbringing is actually very small.

As research this week has confirmed, cohabitations break up twice as frequently as marriages, and – most tellingly for the adoption debate – the arrival of a child tends to precipitate the break-up. Other studies have shown that while 8% of married couples break up within the first five years of their children’s lives, this figure shoots up among cohabiting couples to a massive 52% .

What’s more, marriages where the couple have previously cohabited tend to break down more frequently than where the couple have not lived together.

None of this should be very surprising. After all, people bring very different attitudes to cohabitation and marriage. In deciding to cohabit, they are making a very strong statement that they want the freedom that comes from a built-in opt-out.

It is said that if the adoption amendment went through, councils would require proof that cohabiting couples were stable and committed. But this is absurd. The proof of commitment is marriage.

If a couple are unable to commit themselves to each other for ever, why should we believe they will commit themselves to an adopted child for ever? How can they promise to safeguard that child’s welfare when they refuse to make the commitment to each other that is its best guarantee?

Children who need adoptive parents are intensely vulnerable. The very last thing they need is for their adoptive family to fragment.

Their abiding need above all else is for a mother and a father. Which is why gay adoption is not a good idea. This is not a matter of prejudice. After all, single gay (or straight) people can currently adopt, a provision designed to cover rare circumstances where this is in an individual child’s best interests; and no-one suggests these people make anything other than excellent adoptive parents in these cases.

But in general, gay adoption is not in children’s best interests. They are too vulnerable, and there are too many potential added disadvantages for them to cope with: not only the instability of the unions, but possible difficulties with social adjustment and gender identity.

Gay people deserve sympathy in their desperate longing for family life. Unlike heterosexuals, marriage for them is not an option. But adoption law must be for the benefit of children, not adults.

Of course, children are infinitely better off adopted than in care. But the real need is to end the prejudice and backsliding by council social workers against the thousands of married couples desperate to adopt but who are thwarted by bureaucratic inertia or ideology.

In other words, there is no need to look beyond married couples to end the scandal of children waiting fruitlessly for adoption. The real purpose of the cohabitation amendment is not to benefit children but to signal that alternative lifestyles are equivalent to marriage in moral status.

This idea is being pushed by an unholy coalition of interests. There are enormously powerful voices in legal, adoption and political circles arguing for gay rights. But this lobby knows its cause is unpopular. So it has joined forces with those heterosexuals who want to undermine marriage by spreading its benefits to alternative lifestyles.

Signals matter enormously in shaping attitudes and behaviour.

There is no doubt that this argument over what they should be has become a war-zone of intolerance. On one side, the Christian Institute’s suggestion that parents should carry ‘adoption cards’ declaring they don’t want their children adopted by gay people in the event of their deaths is unnecessarily offensive.

But for sheer venomous hatred and spite one has to go to the other side. The late Baroness Young was vilified for fighting the gay rights agenda in defence of the interests of children and marriage. When she died from cancer a few weeks ago, the gay publication The Pink Paper danced disgustingly on her grave, gloating that activists were ‘delighted’ by her death.

Now Baroness O’Cathain, the peer who has taken up Lady Young’s baton, is getting the same kind of treatment. As the government licks its wounds over its defeat, the chances of the interests of adopted children taking precedence over the self-centred vitriol of the victim culture seem, sadly, more remote than ever.

Posted by admin at October 17, 2002