The Spectator’s Notes | 17 March 2012

 With gay marriage will come gay divorce. If you look at civil partnership dissolutions, the numbers have multiplied more than ten times in four years, though this rate of increase will presumably level off. (The level is still much lower than that of heterosexual marriage.) What will be the grounds for gay divorce? The only legal ground for the dissolution of a civil partnership is that it has ‘broken down irretrievably’. You cannot, as in heterosexual marriage, cite non-consummation or adultery, although ‘unfaithfulness may be recognised as a form of unreasonable behaviour’. It is understandable that this is so, since consummation — viewed by both civil and religious law as the definitive act of marriage because it keeps the human race in existence — can have no such significance in the relationship of homosexuals, and so is indefinable. At present, the legal definition of adultery ‘involves two adults of the opposite sex’.