Homosexuality was once famously described as “the love that dare not speak its name”. This definition fits the Coalition’s attitude to its own Same-Sex Couples Bill. It won’t say a word about it any more. Her Majesty, speaking on the advice of her ministers, did not mention the Bill in her Gracious Speech in Parliament on Wednesday. Yet it is proceeding. It returns to the House of Commons on May 20, and will reach the Lords in June.

Given that David Cameron encountered such strong resistance from his party’s supporters when he introduced the Bill, this silence is not surprising. An opinion poll of Tory defectors to Ukip in the recent council elections showed that a quarter of them had deserted their party because they opposed gay marriage. Obviously, the Prime Minister would rather talk about something else.

His difficulty, however, is that if you are trying to make a really radical change in human society, you must understand what you are doing and argue your case with conviction in public. With gay marriage, the Coalition proposes to alter fundamentally the most important social structure ever known to mankind. If it hopes to slip this quietly past the country over the summer, without any serious consequences, it is being not only dishonest, but stupid.

As the Bill took shape last year, it became clear that its authors had failed to consider two crucial things. The first was the nature of current Equality doctrine. The word “equality” is often bandied about loosely, but, thanks to the modern European dogma of human rights, it now has virtually all-embracing legal force.

According to the “public sector equality duty”, all acts and institutions of government must enforce Equality in all its various “strands”. (There are seven of them, and “gender reassignment” is given the same status as “religion”.) So if same-sex marriage is permitted by law, opposition to it will become a form of discrimination against sexual orientation (one of the seven strands).

The Government says until it is blue – or rather, pink – in the face that conscientious objections to same-sex marriage will be protected. It has specifically laid down that gay marriages may not be celebrated in Church of England churches. But it failed to still the anxiety. If marriage is redefined by statute to include same-sex marriage, then a teacher who refuses to teach this as right is in breach of his public sector equality duty. And while a church will be protected in its own premises, a Christian charity providing services to all, or religious groups wanting to hire council facilities, can be banned by the accusation that they are “homophobic” organisations. If same-sex marriage becomes law, people who conscientiously oppose it will be barred from a career in the public service, and the religious motive, which is the strong arm of the charitable impulse, will be amputated. Even without gay marriage, Catholic adoption agencies which have refused to place babies with homosexual couples have been forced to close down. With same-sex marriage, any charitable religious assistance in family life – a Christian marriage guidance bureau such as Marriage Encounter, for example, maybe even the famous Alpha Course – will be vulnerable to state legal attack.

The second, even deeper problem for the Government, is the nature of marriage itself. Most advocates of gay marriage have not previously given much thought to this. Nor, over the years, have many of them done anything to advance its cause – although, to be fair, Mr Cameron himself has always been a strong advocate of wedlock. Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, for instance, are passionately opposed to helping marriage through the tax system. Obloquy has been poured on the heads of those who argue that marriage is a better way of bringing up children than cohabitation or single parenthood.

When such people start calling for gay marriage, then, it is reasonable to conclude that it is not marriage itself that they are interested in, but Equality for homosexuals. The Government has listened too much to pressure groups and far too little to people who know about marriage. Thus the gay lobby group Stonewall has become a partner with government in educational projects (such as Lesbian and Gay History Month). Its 60,000 signatures in favour of gay marriage were accepted during the Bill’s consultation period as representing that number of individuals, whereas the Coalition for Marriage’s petition signed by 650,000 – more than 10 times the Stonewall number – was counted only as the single voice of one group.

Such lobbyists naturally believed that all you had to do to allow gay marriage was to extend to same-sex couples exactly the same law as applied to existing, heterosexual marriages.

Too late, they discovered, this cannot be done. Civil servants, confronted with the embarrassing task of working out what defined the consummation of a homosexual relationship, faltered. Since homosexual acts have no existential purpose and no procreative result, consummation is a meaningless concept. From this it followed that the Government could come up with no definition of adultery in a homosexual marriage. A law designed to be equal, is not. Under the Bill, non-consummation will not be grounds for divorce in same-sex marriage. Nor will adultery.

By accident, then, the Government is introducing, for the first time, a definition of marriage which has no sexual element. Yet it refuses to face the logical consequence of this surprising innovation. If sexual intercourse is not part of the definition of same-sex marriage, why should blamelessly cohabiting sisters not marry one another in order to avoid inheritance tax? Why should father not marry son? Why shouldn’t heterosexual bachelor chum marry heterosexual bachelor chum? What, come to think about it, is so great about the idea of monogamy, once sex and children are removed from the equation? Does the word “marriage” any longer contain much meaning?

And if Equality is the highest of all moral aims, how can the Government possibly justify not extending the gay right to a civil partnership to heterosexual couples who, at present, have no such privilege? If this Bill becomes law, all these matters will be litigated over, right up to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Against such outcomes, as he painfully well knows, Mr Cameron can make no provision.

Possibly the House of Commons, where mere politics reigns and virtually no time has been permitted for debate on the Bill, will fail to think through these issues, although revolt is growing. But precision and fairness in framing our laws are subjects in which the House of Lords rightly claims a key role. The Government faces trouble there.

Up until now, many of the opponents of gay marriage have felt inhibited. Look, for instance, at the sotto voce response of the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, usually so eloquent on social questions that stretch well beyond his denominational boundary. Listen to the rather uncertain bleats that have emerged from Lambeth Palace in recent years. Respectable people are truly terrified of being thought anti-homosexual. In a way, they are right to be, because attacking people for their personal preferences can be a nasty thing.

But the course of the Same-Sex Couples Bill is gradually revealing that the question here is not much to do with homosexuals. It is to do with marriage itself. Are Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg wiser than every mainstream religion, thousands of years of history and the almost uniform practice of every civilisation? Put the question like that, and the answer is plain. But I do not want to be rude to our well-meaning rulers. All I want to ask is, “Are you quite sure you know what you’re doing? If not, please pause.”

Source: Daily Telegraph