Douglas Murray: A final word on my differences with Paul Goodman

Douglas Murray is the Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion.

When, a few weeks back, in an article on gay marriage, I made a glancing reference to the regrettable views of Paul Goodman I never thought I’d end up having to write one – let alone two – lengthy pieces responding to his increasingly vitriolic and obsessive attacks on me.  Let alone that readers of Conservative Home would be expected to put up with this exchange.  But Monday’s piece by Paul was the blog-equivalent of a drive-by shooting.  This is tediously obsessive even for me – and I was the subject – so I can’t imagine how dull it must be for everybody else.  But Paul’s had a last say – so I’ll do one more correction of him.

Islamism

Even when Paul and I were on friendly terms we were never in full agreement.  The latest pieces from him remind me why.  With the largest Muslim constituency of any Conservative MP, Paul took it upon himself to read a lot of material very fast on Islamic and Islamist theology.  As often happens when people immerse themselves in something new, he went under and seems never to have come back up.

Douglas Murray: I'm not a bigot but Paul Goodman is

Douglas Murray is an award-winning writer and commentator who is currently Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society

Last week Paul Goodman wrote a response to my criticism of his opposition to gay equality – specifically the issue of gay civil marriage.  Paul’s response can be divided into the significant and the personal.  Let me deal with the significant ones first.

Paul argues "if gay marriage is recognised, why not multiple sharia marriages?"  Why one should lead to the other is not clear to me.  If anything could possibly lead to polygamous heterosexual marriage surely it would not be gay marriage but heterosexual marriage?  Yet it has not.  And that is for a very clear reason.  Which is that marriage, in our culture, not to mention law, is between two people.  This is an idea I support.  Without going into all of the reasons for this, or the virtues of it, I would cite one in particular – which is the importance in our culture of the principle of equality in marriage.  By that I mean the extent to which the parties are complementary of each other.