Caroline Dinenage wrote to constitutents voicing her opposition to equal marriage
David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle continues today, with the appointment of Caroline Dinenage to the post of minister for equalities. Dinenage retained her Gosport seat in the election, and is part of Cameron’s new drive to increase the number of women at the Cabinet table.
But a look at Dinenage’s voting record raises questions about her suitability for the job.
In 2013 she voted against the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill at its Second Reading in the House of Commons. She voted for other components of the bill in order to stay loyal to the Tory party line, and was absent for the Bill’s Third Reading.
But there is no ambiguity in Dinenage’s comments on the issue. Responding to a letter from a PinkNews reader the day before the reading, she wrote:
“As you may know, as the established Church, its own Canon Law is part of the law of the land and one of its canons states that marriage is in its nature a union of “one man and one woman”.
I therefore believe that the institution of marriage is distinctive and the State has no right to redefine its meaning – these proposals were not included in any of the three main manifestoes nor did it feature in the Coalition’s Programme for Government.
“As I have mentioned, under current law same-sex couples can have a civil partnership but not a civil marriage and I believe that there is no legitimate reason to change this. Preventing same-sex couples from being allowed to ‘marry’ takes nothing away from their relationship.”
She also told a local newspaper:
‘I’m concerned that in the future teachers may be forced to teach civil partnership and gay marriage whether it’s in their religious belief to do so or not.”
Further back, in 2011, Dinenage was listed by the Daily Mail as one of 118 Tory MPs who had written to constituents stating their opposition to proposals to allow gay marriage. The Mail reported at the time:
“The sheer scale of the opposition means Mr Cameron is facing what has become the biggest Tory rebellion in recent history.”
The list included Cameron’s former equalities minister Nicky Morgan, who also voted against gay marriage.
Is there something the PM isn’t quite getting?
Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter
107 Responses to “‘No legitimate reason’ for same-sex marriage: meet the new equalities minister”
Sophia Marsden
You can’t get married. You can get a bit of paper saying you have been, but it doesn’t mean anything. You cannot produce a child with your lover. Your love is sterile. You can take someone else’s children (adoption), you can have a child by adultery (using donor eggs and/or sperm and maybe even a rented womb), but you cannot make your love produce fruit.
Maybe one day there will be a service that will allow you to manufacture a child from both your gametes in the laboratory, but even then the child will not be the product of your love, of your embrace with your beloved, it will be the product of the technical profession with your cells as an input. You will never know the freedom of a man and a woman. They don’t need a sophisticated industrial society to produce the next generation, they are the seed of civilisation, from only thousand breeding pairs in the wilderness there is enough genetic diversity to sustain the whole species indefinitely.
Nature will never grant you the fruits of marriage, whatever the state says. Your love will never bring forth a new human soul.
Sophia Marsden
In polygamy it is still one man + one woman. It’s just that the man can have more than one marriage (and so more than one wife). The wives are not married to one another.
Sophia Marsden
There’s hardly any Mormons in Britain. Polygamy is a real issue in the UK because there are many women in polygamous marriages with muslim men, who have children, and very little in the way of legal rights in the event of a divorce or separation due to their marriages being unrecognised.
Sophia Marsden
Marriage, as the fertile union of the sexes, has existed longer than any of the religions that still exist on earth. It was not religion that defined it that way, but nature.
Sophia Marsden
It impacts the lives of the children brought up in those families, and those children (and adults) brought up to believe there is no difference between a fertile union between a man and a woman and a sterile union between two men or two women. It impacts society because the state can no longer implement pro or anti natalist policy via policy on marriage. It impacts those suffering from same sex attraction by giving them the false impression that they can attain the positive benefits of marriage which ultimately (though increasingly obfuscated) are contingent on marriage’s generative role in society.