Jim McCrea seems to share the difficulty Clifford Longley has of even considering human procreation as a natural lifelong, heterosexually physical adult intimacy, indispensable for the upbringing of children, of which marriage is the traditionally recognised social support, which the Church has to honour within its sacramental, and the State not diminish within its legal, system. I have not, therefore, ‘imposed’ any definition on marriage, but merely pointed out its own essential properties, which the British government now redefines as inessential to it, leaving marriage indistinguishable from cohabitation, just as previous redefinitions of natural humanity, divided it into different animal species, left human indistinguishable from sub-human species, and opened the way to slavery and racism. The present redefinition of marriage also opens the way for McCrea, on the one hand, to see no more in marriage than friendship, downplaying psychosomatic physical relations by contrast, and on the other, to regard those relations as so essential to his relationship with his friend as to make him change it into a carnally ‘marital’ one that is nevertheless unfit for any procreative purpose; all on the false argument that, if lasting mutual love perfects marriage, then marriage perfects lasting mutual love, whereas in fact, on his own admission, it adds nothing to it, and indeed demeans the purity of such friendship by the mutual carnal exploitation involved.

Clifford Longley’s understanding of ‘natural’ is too negative to do adequate justice to that term in its implication of original, pristine, authentic genuineness, all of which are metaphysical characteristics of the system of nature itself, to whose arrangement and origin people can give respect with or without calling it ‘God’. Human marriage is defined within that system, and only becomes supernatural as a means to the personal intimacy with God that faith in Jesus Christ brings. If Nature is not God, nature is nothing but the 50-50 chance that everything exists or that it does not. If Nature is God, then it is its own choice to be, and to enable anything that is not everything, also to be. The alternative to creationism of intelligent design, is instrumentalism of aimless absence of design!

Speighdd chooses to slant the discussion by imposing his definition on what, in the eyes of the State, a civil, secular matter.

Churches have the right and duty to define what they mean by their sacraments, whatever they may be.

The states have the right and duty to define what they mean by secular, civil marriage.

I submit that same-gender couples who have been together for many years are in a position to teach the rest of the world what love and marriage really are! If it is only a feeling, then these relationships would have fallen by the wayside (as many have, but that’s true for opposite-gender couples as well) early on.

There has been NO support from Mother Church and, until recently, little to none from Father State.

The survivability of the couples that I know (many of them have been together in excess of 20, 30 and 40 years) can only be attributed to what love really is: sustainability, mutuality, support, endurance, sheer desire to do so …. In other words, love. It’s something that starts out emotionally but, over time, finds out that what has been found is worth keeping and developing and growing.

My partner of 42 years (now husband of 2 weeks; yes, I'm still counting) and I didn’t stick together through some pretty rough times because of some oozy-woozy, fuzzy-wuzzy, ephemeral feelings. Sheer tenacity aimed at a higher goal had an awful lot to do with it!

It is misleading of Clifford Longley to suggest both that the Catholic Church confuses natural with sacramental marriage, and that it is quite familiar with valid marriages that are not sacramental. The Church also finds it less difficult than he does, to recognise that Nature is God, and that therefore marriage is natural inasmuch as it is created by God, and not if simply set up by government ‘dictat’ or trendy popular opinion. To be natural, marriage has to satisfy all the minimum requirements for its authenticity, like heterosexuality and temporal indissolubility, as distinct from the maximum requirements for its success as marriage, like stably communal living and a deepening bond of love, which the partners could also have without being married. God creates what He works with, and neither He nor the Church can go back on it.