We may fund forced abortion in China and elsewhere, but it is impossible to overstate the constitutional crisis that would follow from any legislative attempt formally to require anyone in this country to have an abortion. We may have eroded the special character of Sunday to such an extent that many people are effectively compelled to work on it, but it is impossible to overstate the constitutional crisis that would follow from any direct attempt to write that compulsion into law, or formally to declare Sunday a normal shopping day. We may have deregulated drinking and gambling to an alarming extent, but it is impossible to overstate the constitutional crisis that would follow from any legislative attempt to abolish all restrictions on them.

And we may long ago have come to the humane and necessary conclusion that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private were no business of the criminal law, but it is impossible to overstate the constitutional crisis that would follow from any legislative attempt to make the acquisition of certain civil privileges conditional upon engagement in such acts, or indeed in any form of sexual act other than that between husband and wife. As Leo Abse himself said on the fortieth anniversary of his Bill's becoming law, “merely because something ought not to be a criminal offence, that does not make it a public good”.

It is a pity that, by abolishing the fault basis in divorce, we have abolished the State's, and thus the community's, expression of disapproval of adultery and desertion even though neither of them has ever been a criminal offence. And it is more than a pity that we have, for the time being, restricted civil partnerships to unrelated same-sex couples even though, with no requirement for consummation nor any constitutional possibility of such a requirement, civil partnerships do not in principle have anything to do with homosexuality.

We have privileged subscription to the scientifically baseless and historically illiterate theory that an inclination towards homosexual acts is somehow an identity, that persons rather than only acts are homosexual or heterosexual, and that those terms are nouns as well as adjectives. That absurd notion is barely, if yet, forty years old, and it was invented in, by and for urban, coastal American subcultures that defined themselves by their sexual abuse of teenage boys. Britain's pre-eminent homosexualist organisation takes its name from a centre of such abuse.

The legislation must be amended immediately to allow unmarried relatives, whether of the same or of opposite sexes, to register their partnerships. Then there would be no problem. If it had said that at the time of its enactment, then there would never have been anything more than a few newspaper stories about how same-sex couples were “planning to make use of a new law to protect elderly unmarried relatives living together from inheritance tax when one of them dies”. So why wasn't it set up like that? See above, I'm afraid.

Most people think that “integrity” means that one doesn't lie. The author of this sad piece apparently doesn't understand this.