There is a link between marriage and church attendance and it has been highlighted in an excellent book by Robert Wuthnow called ‘After the Baby Boomers: How twenty- and thirty-somethings are shaping the future of American religion’. Much of what it has to say can be applied directly to Ireland.

Yesterday's story about a Japanese couple who split up, leaving their surrogate-conceived newborn child in legal limbo illustrates a number of features of the worldview behind surrogacy and related AHR technologies.

Ever since being elected leader of the Tory Party, marriage and the family have been central to David Cameron’s political agenda. Over and over again he has stressed that strong families are the key to ending Britain's social problems. To that end, he has promised to give married couples a tax break.

The modern sexual ethic can be very easily summarised; anything goes between consenting adults. It is neat, easily understood respects the right to privacy as defined in a certain kind of way.

The UN Human Rights Committee has demanded that Ireland legalise abortion and cease favouring the family based on marriage.

The case of Norfolk police officer Graham Cogman again raises the issue of religious liberty in the workplace. Coming hard on the heels of the finding of the Central London Employment Tribunal that a London council had violated the religious liberty of a Christian worker, Lillian Ladele, MR Cogman's case seems to be another case of harassment and discrimination against a person of faith.

The decision by the Australian Federal Court to throw out a law which made it illegal to cause "annoyance or inconvenience to World Youth Day participants” was probably the correct one. If we are to defend the principle of freedom of speech for religious people, we have to defend the principle in general, otherwise it becomes special pleading.

In Saturday’s Irish Times Breda O’Brien explained in her column that we have traditionally given special support to marriage because this is how we try to ensure that every child is raised by a mother and father.

Yesterday's speech by Conservative leader (and probable next Prime Minister) David Cameron was interesting from a number of perspectives. From the purely social point of view, they contain more than a grain of truth. It has become almost impossible to use words like right and wrong in any serious way because of the paralysing fear that one will commit the most horrid of crimes, that of giving “offence”, or worse, appearing “judgmental”.

A new study commissioned by the Equality Authority finds that women do 39 minutes more work per day than men on average when house work is added to paid work. A study like this gives new meaning to the old 1960s slogan that the personal is political.

A newspaper report caught the eye the other day. It involved Adriana Iliescu and her three year old daughter. What makes this situation extremely unusual is that Adriana is 70. She used a sperm-donor and Assisted Reproduction to have her child at the age of 67.

A fortnight ago the House of Commons voted to drop the requirement that fertility clinics must consider a child’s need for a father. This has been replaced with the notion of ‘supportive parenting’. We are to believe that motherhood and fatherhood doesn’t matter, even though every child has a mother and father. Only ‘parenthood’ matters. It’s the kind of thinking that calls husbands, wifes, spouses, girlfriends and boyfriends by the de-gendered, all- inclusive term, ‘partners’.

However, now we find that the British Government has introduced a new law requiring that new mothers provide the name of their child’s father to the statutory authorities so it can be put on the birth cert, and that the fathers sign the birth cert to acknowledge paternity.

In Britain, about 50,000 children a year are born without their father’s name being recorded on their birth cert. In Ireland the figure is between 3,000 and 4,000.

According to government sources, the move is intended to put parental responsibility centre stage. James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said: “Registering a child’s birth isn’t just a legal requirement, it’s a lifetime commitment by both parents to safeguard their child's development, health and welfare, and provide them with direction and guidance throughout childhood.”

You don’t have to be Einstein to spot the total contradiction between this action, and the deletion of the need for a father from the laws regulating the Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR) industry. If a child has a right to know his or her father, and if the father has a responsibility to his child, then surely this applies across the board regardless of the means by which the child is conceived?

But no, in order to placate gay and lesbian groups (primarily) and to show a commitment to ‘equality’, in the case of AHR the British Government has declared that fathers are not needed. This is dogmatism on stilts. Either fathers are needed, or they aren’t. The British Government needs to get its lines straight

05/06/08