The basic question in life is “What is actually going on?” and it often requires a great deal of time to pass before one can find the answer. That is why I have only just begun to understand what is actually at stake in the proposal to recognize civil partnerships as “marriages.” And the clue came when I discovered that Stonewall, the homosexual rights group in Britain, was proposing a memorandum that the terms “husband” and “wife” should be removed from the 1973 Marriage Act and replaced by “parties to the marriage.” This apparently trivial bit of semantics carries a large moral significance.

It is part of a two-stage operation. In the first stage, some new liberating move is proposed, and anyone with an eye for personal freedom—libertarians and conservatives alike—will support the move. But then comes a new development: the propaganda that seeks to persuade us—and usually also the luckless children in schools—that the new situation must change our attitudes to the world. Freedoms, in other words, become paradoxically entwined with the repressions of political correctness. Let me elaborate this thesis.

We associate the 1960s with a set of “liberations” that set the seal on a decent way of life, opening up choice and a clean sweep of out-of-date restrictions on our conduct, especially in sexual matters. Above all, it is associated with Feminism as liberating women from the household, conceived of in those terms as a kind of prison. Changing attitudes and technology had been