If Same Sex Marriage Were Legal (1)

Same Sex Marriage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If same sex marriage were legal in the UK, would there be any moral or philosophical reason not to also legalise polygamy?

If no, then that answer at least has the benefit of consistency. It allows for marriage (as with much else in the postmodern age) to be defined in an way that the individual wishes.  Many Libertarians do in fact take this view, and reject the idea that the state should legislate on marriage at all.

If an advocate of same sex marriage were to argue at the same time that polygamy should not be legalised in the UK (it carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years at present) then it would be incumbent upon that person to show why the one should be legal and the other not. It would be interesting to hear whether such a person could make such a case (for legal same sex marriage but illegal polygamy) without resorting to moral judgements about the nature of marriage - a thing that many liberal advocates of same sex marriage are reluctant to do. Indeed, many advocates of same sex marriage are highly critical of those who oppose it on moral grounds. 

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Why 98% of abortions in Britain are now technically illegal.

Christian Medical Comment: Why 98% of abortions in Britain are now technicall...

Whatever your views on abortion, you must read this article by Dr Peter Saunders who makes a (to me) persuasive case that the current law in the UK should be interpreted as showing that 98% of abotions in the UK are in fact in breach of the law.

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Alan Hirsch on the Forgotten Ways

I love what Alan is saying here about the characteristics of spontaneous mission movements.

My only concern is that, as with so much of this type of material, its starting point is the situation in the United States (despite Alan's Australian background.)

If the mainstream model of church is only capable (culturally) of reaching 40% of the American population (in which 90% of the population claim to believe in God), then those of us called to serve in the UK, with its more entrenched secularism and lower religious worldview are surely in need of thinking especially carefully about Alan's diagnosis as we seek to be the church of God in our cultural context.

Peak Oil Entering Political Mainstage

Both the British government (here) and the German military (here) are reported this week to be actively planning towards the possibility of a global spike in the price of oil as the amount of gas and oil continues to decline, and despite environmentally unsustainable exploration in deep oceans and the Arctic.

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• Study Warns of Perilous Oil Crisis (green.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Jeffrey Rubin: Germany and the UK Prepare for Peak Oil (huffingtonpost.com)

A Brief History of Afghanistan

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The BNP, the Left and an Opportunity

Interesting post by Left Luggage on the implications of the recent BNP electoral successes. Some highlights of the piece:

• policies (denial of benefits to migrants, death penalty, increased police powers) held by the BNP are also held by 15-20% of the UK population according to a recent MORI poll
• to prevent the far-right turning this potential support into actual votes, there is a need to fill "the political vacuum left by Labour’s desertion of the working class", a topic commented on in a recent review of Colin Crouch's book Post Democracy here.
• the BNP draws its support primarily from older manual working class voters and those on state benefits
• the left has been "unable to approach" the issue of immigration effectively
  
• "voter volatility is at a post-WWII high" meaning that the British electoral market is more open to new entrants than it has been in modern history. LL concludes, however that "there is no 'new entrant' from the Left to speak of and the BNP are proving effective at filling the vacuum from the far-right."

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What Next for Property?

Listened to an interesting podcast recently by "renegade economist" Fred Harrison on the need to tax land not income as the basis for public finance and long term market stability.

His ideas, if implemented, would challenge the need for a blog such as this one (hardly a great loss in the overall scheme of things.) This was the man who in April 2005 predicted a property price down turn in the UK at the end of 2007 and into 2008.

Worth a listen as lots of people in developed countries are now starting to ask fundamental, structural questions about the nature of the economies they are a part of - questions which go way beyond the short term issue of whether the value of my house will rise or fall next month.

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