The Guardian website is the not the first place you would expect to see an acknowledgement of the uniqueness of traditional marriage. In fact, it’s probably one of the last places you’d look.

But this blog by Guardian political writer Michael White makes exactly that point.

To be sure, there are a lot of contentious points made in White’s piece. He seems to be suggesting that there is a paradox in the position of those who “love marriage, but insist it’s only for straight people and get quite cross with David Cameron……for even allowing his junior…..equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, to float this week’s trial balloon about gay people being allowed to tie the proverbial on hallowed ground.

However, White parts company with same-sex marriage activists “over efforts to insist on being able to marry in precisely the same way as straight people do”.

White points out that there is “an important practical distinction here [between opposite-sex and same-sex marriage] which goes to the root of any society – namely that heterosexual marriage is there to produce and raise children in a more or less stable environment”.

He adds: “There’s no way around the biological fact that no amount of high-tech chicken basting can eliminate the need for a female egg and a male sperm to make a baby. On that fact rest all successful societies since the year dot.”

No defender of traditional marriage could put it better.

White goes to admit that gay adoption is “less than ideal – I think children need parents of both sexes, don’t you?”

And he adds: “I merely note in passing that the ever more permissive society in the rich west is barely 40 years old, has always been contested and is piling up problems different from the more conformist societies it replaced – but problems none the less.”

The piece is somewhat rambling is parts, but to see any sort of pro-marriage sentiments expressed on the Guardian’s website is noteworthy. It’s worth a read.