MP for Gainsborough Edward Leigh has come under fire for suggesting on his website that only a ‘tiny number’ of gay people want marriage instead of civil partnerships… and that giving gays marriage rights is to ‘mangle’ the language of marriage.
Mr Leigh wrote on edward-leigh.net: “I am astonished and disappointed that a Conservative Government, albeit a coalition one, has announced it is consulting on whether to do away with traditional marriage which has always been between a man and a woman.”
He expressed concern that, “for the sake of the tiny number of gay people who prefer marriage to civil partnership, everyone else in society must have the definition of their own marriage altered forever.”
He even suggested that if gays could marry, perhaps polygamists would start demanding the right as well: “Once we have departed from the universally understood framework of marriage, there is no logical reason why the new alternative institution should be limited to two people. Why not three? Or thirty-three?”
