Marriage proposal

LAST week’s News (21 August) featured the touching story of young Jaden’s plea to the Prime Minister for recognition of same-sex marriage.
Jaden shared his feelings of perplexity at being excluded from family happiness, wanting his mother and her lesbian partner to be be fully recognised as being married.
What a deep subject; too deep to do justice here! However let us remind ourselves that everyone of us reading this has both a father and a mother. We all have biological parents. This is inescapable fact. This is fundamental to all relationships that involve families.
Same-sex partners can never be natural parents for obvious anatomical reasons. This is commonsense, self-evident and apparently needs to be re-stated. It is a truth that is absolute, a truth that we know is instinctively fact.
Yet it is sadly true that not all families enjoy happiness, and certainly not all the time.
Families do breakdown and go through re-structuring in all sorts of ways.
Nevertheless, is this a good enough reason to redefine marriage, as though the fault lay with the definition, rather than with the participants in the marriage?
Under law, marriage is the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.
I would implore that under no circustances should society water-down this definition.
To redefine marriage is discriminatory to those husbands and wives who have faithfully made their vows and fulfilled their committments to each other.
They have rights, too, let us remember.
Traditional marriage with one father and one mother as the biological parents should always be honoured as the ideal basis for the family.
This provides the best chance for a loving and stable environment for nurturing children who clearly enjoy their biologically-given gender.
In attempting to bring happiness to same-sex relationships, as admirable and compassionate as that might seem, let us not demolish what is intrinsically good and wholesome.
Marriage is the “glue” that holds society together.
Please keep marriage for one man and one woman to the exclusion of others.
Paul Reid,
Berwick.