C4M is 3 today

Coalition for Marriage is three years old today!

When we began back in 2012 it was to promote and defend traditional marriage in response to the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

Only a few years before it would have been difficult to imagine the need for such a defence. The definition of marriage as “the voluntary union for life, of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others” was one that had stood the test of time. Marriage has been, and still is, the most successful partnership in history, stretching back thousands of years, across cultures, and across the world.

We must not forget that for the Coalition Government this was not a question of ‘whether’ but of ‘how’ marriage should be redefined. We should also not forget that this was a plan that failed to appear in any party manifesto prior to the 2010 election.

Nevertheless, in July 2013, and with utter disregard to the petition of more than 500,000 signatures submitted to Downing Street, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill cleared Parliament, thereby changing the legal definition of marriage for everyone.

So why are we still here?

Well, that battle may have been lost but new high-stakes issues have arisen as a result, just as we said they would. One need only look at the cases of individuals and businesses being punished because they refuse to endorse this new definition of marriage.

Even before the legislation was passed, Adrian Smith had to go all the way to the High Court to get a favourable ruling after being demoted and losing 40 per cent of his salary for a Facebook post saying that same-sex marriages in churches would be “an equality too far”.

More recently, Bryan Barkley has been dismissed by the Red Cross for holding up a sign with ‘No Same Sex Marriage’ on it and Ashers Baking Co. in Northern Ireland is being taken to court by a taxpayer-funded quango for refusing to decorate a cake with a pro same-sex marriage campaign slogan. It’s not very difficult to imagine that such cases will occur with greater frequency.

So C4M remains as a sadly all-too-necessary voice for people who uphold traditional marriage.

We will continue to hold politicians to account for their actions, and we will continue to highlight cases of injustice against people who believe in traditional marriage.

With nearly 700,000 passionate and committed supporters nationwide, we are one of the largest campaign groups in the nation, and we have no intention of letting our political leaders forget that we are here.