The recent ruling by the Supreme Court on a polygamous marriage means that exclusivity is no longer considered an essential element in marriage. So, marriage does not have to be exclusive under the new legal dispensation, it does not have to be the conjugal union of a man and a woman, it cannot be legally...
Iona Institute NI spokespeople Mary Lewis and Tracy Harkin appeared on the BBC today (Friday). Mary appeared on The Nolan Show to discuss the decision to allow the NHS to fund Northern Ireland women who travel to England for abortions. Mary’s contribution can be heard here (21 minutes and 53 seconds in). Tracy appeared on...
Justin Trudeau is the insufferably trendy, attention-seeking, virtue-signalling Prime Minister of Canada. One of Trudeau’s gimmicks is wearing specially made socks designed to draw attention to whatever is on his mind on any given day. For example, on May 4 he wore a pair of Star Wars socks because apparently May 4th is ‘The Force...
Last year the Constitutional Court of Colombia legalised same-sex marriages. Now three men in Medellin have gained legal recognition as a ‘polyamorous family’ unit with inheritance rights. The trio will hold a marriage ceremony and then go on honeymoon. Now that many people have decided that sexual complementarity is irrelevant to marriage, why should we...
It is now official. Marriage is about adults first and foremost. Last week, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of a Muslim man who wanted his marriage to a second woman recognised under Irish law. The Court recognised only the validity of his first marriage as that marriage still existed. In her...
We know that the number of Down Syndrome babies who are aborted annually in the UK is shockingly high, but it turns out that the figure given by the Department of Health in Britain is a gross underestimate. The Department of Health (DH) puts the figure at about 700, but the true total is more...
Abortion statistics for England and Wales in 2016 were published this week. There were 190,406 abortions carried out in 2016, slightly lower than in 2015 (191,014). Of those women, 3,265 had an address in Ireland and 724 in Northern Ireland. The abortion rate for residents in England and Wales is 16.0 every 1000 women aged...
Regular international surveys of student performance have become a feature of the world of education in recent years. The two best-known such surveys are TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study – run by the IEA) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment – run by the OECD). The former measures the performance of...
The recent terrorist attacks in Manchester and London prompts a writer in The Irish Times to ponder not the nature of Islam, as would seem natural given the stated motivations of the attackers, but to accuse modern Christianity of being an “exercise in cherry-picking”, one that leaves out the more difficult passages in the Bible....
One of the arguments we used in the marriage referendum of two years ago was that a change to the constitutional definition of the family would take away the natural right of a child to a mother and a father. This was strongly denied by the Yes side, but an article by a law lecturer...
