2026: The case for real marriage is back in the open!
As 2025 closes, something important has shifted. For years, public life has tried to treat real marriage as a private preference, too awkward to mention and too ‘controversial’ to defend. This year, the costs of that pretence have become harder to hide, and the public conversation has started to reopen.
One of the clearest signals came from an unexpected place: GCSE results week. Commentators again asked why white working-class pupils are struggling, and C4M highlighted the factor sitting underneath the attainment gap: family stability, and especially marriage. The analysis was blunt: “The more stable your home, the better you do.”
From there, the year kept reinforcing the same theme: when elites remove marriage from the story, they do not create neutrality, they create drift.
We saw this in the pressure to reframe family itself, from a child-centred institution rooted in mother and father, into whatever adult arrangement the law can be pushed to validate. C4M tracked the push for multi-parent recognition through a Quebec case where three men seek recognition as three legal parents, and warned how quickly law follows the logic once mothers and fathers are treated as optional.
We saw the same “drift” closer to home in the UK’s parallel-marriage problem. C4M challenged ministerial mis-speak about sharia councils being “in common” with Christian and Jewish courts and argued for one clear rule that protects women and children: one public, civil law of marriage for all.
And we saw how the pressure is now hardening into a wider policy programme, not just in Britain but across Europe. The EU’s new LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026-2030 explicitly advances legal gender self-declaration and centres “rainbow families”, with clear implications for how states talk about mothers, fathers, and children’s rights.
Yet 2025 also brought real signs of resistance and recalibration.
Even journalists are finding that the old “gotcha” around defending man-woman marriage is losing its power. When pressed, senior politicians are increasingly willing to say plainly that children do better with two stable parents, and that the most stable relationships tend to be between a man and a woman.
Most encouragingly, Britain has started talking about fathers again. The Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys report helped force fatherlessness back into public debate, and C4M made the case that culture does not change by accident. When law and policy treat fathers as optional, society absorbs the message. When we tell the truth again, we can rebuild.
That is exactly why C4M exists, and why it matters that we are a UK-wide campaign with a single focus: keeping real marriage, as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, on the nation’s agenda. C4M is not a general ‘values’ organisation. We track the policy detail, we name the drift, and we keep putting the evidence back in front of institutions that would rather look away.
Thank you for standing with us through 2025. If our work has helped you this year, please consider supporting it into 2026, so we can keep making the case for the family structure that still works best for children and for society.
And a happy 2026 to all our supporters!