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- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
Manners & moralsThe basic question in life is “What is actually going on?” and it often requires a great deal of time to pass before one can find the answer. That is why I have only just begun to understand what is actually at stake in the proposal to recognize civil partnerships as “marriages.” And the clue came when I discovered that Stonewall, the homosexual rights group in Britain, was proposing a memorandum that the terms “husband” and “wife” should be removed from the 1973 Marriage Act and replaced by “parties to the marriage.” This apparently trivial bit of semantics carries a large moral significance. It is part of a two-stage operation. In the first stage, some new liberating move is proposed, and anyone with an eye for personal freedom—libertarians and conservatives alike—will support the move. But then comes a new development: the propaganda that seeks to persua ...
Subscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 October 2012, on page 33 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-march-of-folly-7453
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