Read Anthony McCarthy's fascinating report of the Cork same-sex marriage debate

On 1 October, Anthony McCarthy, SPUC's education and publications manager, debated at University College Cork Philosophical Society on the subject of same-sex marriage. Also opposing same-sex marriage was Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked Online. Speaking in favour of same-sex marriage were Katherine Zappone, a lesbian senator from Canada, and Max Krzyzanowski, an Irish gay rights activist. Do read the whole of Anthony's fascinating report of the debate on the SPUC website. Here are some key quotations from Anthony's arguments:

• "The attempt to make natural institutions [e.g. marriage] conform to personal desires [e.g. homosexuality] is always a grave error."
• "[There is ] no middle ground when it came to competing notions of sex and the family."
• "[T]he evidence does not support the claims of gay parenting promoters. Underlying all the propaganda and citation of methodologically worthless papers is, in fact, a deep rejection of the biological family.  Sometimes this will take the form of supporting, not gay adoption, but the use of donor eggs or sperm to produce a child ... As with gay marriage, the rights of adults here are, it seems, what ultimately matters."
• "[W]e are faced with a new image of the person – one where sexual differences and biological ties are robbed of all meaning, and marriage and the family lose their status as the foundational unit of society."
• "[T]hose seeking to impose a new and incoherent anthropology [i.e. gay marriage] are violently intolerant of opposition to their cause."
• "[T]he [UK] government’s proposal to airbrush certain words from official documentation: words like husband, wife, father, mother."
• "The gay-marriage issue is giving the state extraordinary leeway to interfere in married and family life, which have traditionally been considered no-go zones."
• "[S]terile and unnatural sex is elevated and fruitfulness despised and persecuted"
• "[In contrast] a vision of life that understands the difference between being a parent and being a gamete donor, and in which the love and nurture of young human lives is seen as more important than adult ‘sexual rights’."

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