There is hard evidence that in Africa abstinence and fidelity programmes are effective in the fight against HIV/AIDS. (See ‘The Invisible Cure’ by Helen Epstein).

Bishop Leo O'Reilly, who is head of the Catholic Bishops' commission on education, wrote a lucid and timely piece in the Irish Times yesterday, emphasising the importance of parental choice in response to a poll carried in that paper suggesting that a majority of people wished to see the State wholly take over Catholic primary schools.

At last something approximating a debate took place in the Dail yesterday concerning the Civil Partnership Bill. Several Fine Gael deputies have now spoken up in favour of a conscience and/or religious freedom amendment of some sort including Damien English, Leo Varadkar, Lucinda Creighton, Seymour Crawford and of course, Sean Barrett.

The election of a Republican, Scott Brown, to the US Senate from the heavily-Democratic Massachusetts is the political equivalent of an tsunami.

Professor Chai Feldblum, who was recently nominated by Barack Obama for one of the seats on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, basically wants people who don't share her views on sexual morality restricted from public life.

We are well used to the debate about marriage focusing on the potential harm that separation, divorce, cohabitation etc has on children. And rightly so, as all the evidence tells us that children reared outside of intact marriages are more likely to experience poverty, abuse, take drugs, become sexually active earlier, drop out of school etc. Not only is that bad for children there’s a knock-on effect to society too.

Almost everyone agrees that when decisions about a child are being made, those decisions should be made in the child’s best interests. That’s the easy part. The hard part is deciding which decision, from a whole range of options, would best serve the child in a given case. For example, parents frequently disagree with one another as to the best course of action for their children.

Polyamory is a term of fairly recent coinage that describes a situation whereby someone is in a sexual relationship with more than one person and all parties to the relationship know this.

Lost amid the coverage of the Murphy report when it came out at the end of November was a very interesting comment by Noel Ahern TD that there might be an “anti-adoption bias” at senior levels of the Irish Department of Health and of the Health Service Executive (HSE).

The Law Reform Commission have proposed allowing teenagers to obtain contraception without their parents' knowledge. The proposal has been criticised by, amongst others, ourselves here at The Iona Institute, and the National Parents Council, for leaving parents out of the equation and letting down young people.

A number of articles have appeared in the press in the last few days defending parental choice in education.

Those of us who support traditional marriage are regularly criticised by the liberal left as narrow-minded and intolerant. They say we are narrow-minded because we are blinkered to the realities of family diversity already in our society.