They call us ‘contamination’ – and want us dismantled!

A Brussels lobby group whose donors include Belgium’s foreign ministry has branded the Coalition for Marriage and our views on man-woman marriage as “contamination”. It wants us and groups like us to be dismantled. Its report, launched in the European Parliament on Monday, names C4M eight times and calls for “the decontamination of Europe”, which it spells out as “the patient dismantling of the anti-gender movement’s actors, its mobilisation and its narratives”.

The group is Forbidden Colours, and the report is The Hate Review. C4M is one of the “actors”. The mobilisation is you. The report calls our petition of almost 670,000 signatures “the largest organised anti-gender petition campaign of the period”, and ranks Britain among “the most heavily contaminated states”.

And their attack is on marriage itself. The report calls “marriage as a union of a man and a woman” part of the “founding language” of the “anti-gender movement” – us – and dismisses a child’s “right to a mother and a father” as merely “claimed”.

The report goes on to say the contamination it finds in us “behaves like a chronic infection that never clears”. Europe has a long and dark history of branding the people it disliked as unclean. It must never go there again, about anyone. Rhetoric like this must be stopped in its tracks.

Nor is this just one angry pressure group. Forbidden Colours lists Belgium’s foreign ministry among its current donors. With that ministry’s support, it set up a network against so-called anti-gender movements across Europe. It has even asked for them to be watched by Belgium’s intelligence services. Last November the European Parliament voted for a review of all current European Union funding to “ensure that no EU funds go towards anti-democratic and anti-gender objectives and projects”, and “anti-gender” is the label this report puts on us.

But the law is on our side. By the report’s measure, even the European Convention on Human Rights is ‘contaminated’, because its marriage article begins “Men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry”. In England and Wales, the law expressly protects our right to support and promote man-woman marriage: “any discussion or criticism of marriage which concerns the sex of the parties to marriage shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred”. When Parliament redefined marriage in 2013, the minister in charge, Maria Miller, promised it “does not prevent people, whether at work or outside, from expressing their belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman. That is their right.”

This report wants that right dismantled, and the Government’s own draft Conversion Practices Bill threatens to do just that. The report calls opposition to Britain’s conversion practices ban “systematic obstruction of progressive legislation”. That isn’t obstruction, it’s democracy. The draft Conversion Practices Bill would make “psychological or emotional pressure” to change someone’s sexual orientation or transgender identity part of a crime carrying up to five years in prison. It never mentions freedom to express views around marriage and protects nothing anyone says about it. So a mother or father could end up in the dock for what they teach their own child. A Bill like that can’t be mended. It needs to be dropped altogether.

Please write to your MP today. Tell them that believing marriage is between a man and a woman isn’t hate, and you expect them to oppose the draft Conversion Practices Bill. WriteToThem makes it easy, but please do so in your own words.

The 670,000 people who signed our petition were never a contamination. They were ordinary men and women – many of you – standing up for the one institution built to give a child a mother and a father and, statistically, the best start in life. They call it contamination, we call it marriage. We call on the Government to drop the Bill.

They want us dismantled. But with you behind us, we’re not going anywhere.