Even the counselling profession is cancelling marriage
As we know, marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman, faithful and exclusive. This meaning of marriage has been attacked on three fronts at once in the space of as many weeks.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin in the therapy room. On 10 July, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, a leading professional body for counsellors, directed its members to its guidance on relationships. The guidance calls secret non-monogamy – in other words, infidelity – “a relationship model” that is “at least as common as monogamy, if not more so”, and tells the counsellor that “the goal of therapy is not to stop the non-monogamous person”. The same body forbids its members any attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation – it signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy – yet is content to let them present the breaking of marriage vows as just another way to live. Desire, it seems, is sovereign – unless the desire is to keep your vows.
The Government has published its draft Conversion Practices Bill to create a new offence banning what the counselling professions have already banned. A law to forbid what is already forbidden can only be reaching for what is not yet a crime: the sermon, the counsel a believer freely asks for, the honest word between husband and wife or parent and child. After eight years, ministers have not named one victim the existing law could not already protect – yet the penalty they propose is up to five years in prison.
The third front is in Parliament this Friday. On 17 July, the House of Lords gives a Second Reading to Lord Marks’s Cohabitation Rights Bill, which would grant couples who merely live together many of the same rights that marriage grants – a settlement when they part, a share of the estate when one dies – after three years, or sooner if there is a child. It is not the Government's Bill but his own, pressed again and again since 2013, and it runs deliberately alongside the Government’s own cohabitation consultation. Two routes, one destination: to erase the difference between marriage and simply living together in law. Ministers protest that they will keep marriage distinct, but a thing is not kept distinct by handing its privileges to those who declined it.
None of this is an accident, and none of it began this month. The redefinition of marriage took place in 2013, and everything downstream has been coming loose ever since – the therapist’s ethics, the criminal draftsman’s pen, the cohabitant’s claim. The law had already made no-fault divorce, so that a broken vow need no longer even be named. Now the counsellor will not even call it wrong. It is one idea, patiently pressed: that marriage is nothing in particular, and may therefore be made into anything at all. There has rarely been a more sustained period of assault on the plain meaning of real marriage.