Thursday, 12 January 2012

Archbishop of York repudiates marriage?

I caught part of Archbishop Sentamu's interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning. As William Oddie points out, it was not so much what Archbishop Sentamu said as what he did not say that is of significance.

I was waiting for the archbishop to go on to say that but, and then explain that though of course, as the Children’s Society says, “the quality of children’s relationships with their families is far more important than the structure of the family that they live in”, that nevertheless a basic determining factor in the quality of relationships within any family is that family’s stability, the sense of security it gives its children, and that all the evidence shows that families based on marriage are very considerably more likely not to break up (that, archbishop is why marriage is the “bedrock of society”, it isn’t just a mantra you are supposed to utter before going on implicitly to deny it). The word but was, however, never uttered by the archbishop, just as in the Children’s Society report he was launching, the word “marriage” doesn’t appear at all, not once.

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