Most people do eventually marry, and the overwhelming majority of children in Britain are still living with both their natural parents
AS a student in the 1960s, I went in for most of the fashionable pastimes of the day, from smoking cannabis to casual sex. Does that make me a permanent member of the pot and promiscuity community? Hardly. Like the majority of my contemporaries, I moved on to legal intoxicants and monogamy. This change came about not because I calculated that it would be in my interests to be respectable, but because my emotional needs and inclinations changed with growing maturity. Like many of my generation, I found the life that we had adopted as a matter of rebellious, anti-bourgeois principle to be shallow, selfish and ultimately brutal.
To put it in the spirit of the time, I had discovered the truth of what Janis Joplin used to sing: "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." No one seems to have a problem with this. I am not accused of being a hypocrite or a traitor. I am not considered to be somehow reneging on my true nature because the predilections of my youth are not the same as those of my adult self. But if my adolescent sexual experiments had been with other women, I would not be thought - at least in certain vociferous quarters - to have the right to change my mind about what sort of person I am.
That is because homosexuality has ceased to be a name for certain kinds of acts and become the defining trait of any person who has ever performed, or even been tempted to perform, such acts. In more discreet times, homosexual attraction, if not fully fledged activity, was seen as an unexceptional phase of adolescent life. For many boys and girls, it was a short-lived substitute for the more awesome business of coping with a mysterious opposite sex. Now gay life has become a militant freemasonry to which one is recruited for lifelong commitment. The ancient Greeks, who are often summoned up as proto-homophiles, would have been mystified at the idea of a "homosexual person". Men may have engaged in sexual acts with other men, but they did not understand this to be a sign of some separate sexual character: it would not have occurred to them to think that sexual relations with women - let alone marriage and parenthood - should be ruled out of their lives by such occasional practices.
A notion that would seem even more bizarre to the ancients would be that there was some public significance to the categorising of people by their past or present sexual activity. Until quite recently, it was thought that advertising the details of one's sexual tastes or intimate relationships was tasteless and undignified. Now the most personal side of life - relations, feelings and acts - have become part of "Lifestyle Politics".
This is not just the case with homosexuality, although that has the noisiest lobby. It also applies to verbally less succinct categories: the living-together-before-marrieds, the cohabiting-without-intending-to-marry, the transient-singles-currently-under-one-roof, and so on.
Many of these permutations are likely to be temporary stages in the lives of those whom they describe. Their living arrangements may have very little to do with the conscious adoption of a "lifestyle" and more to do with indecision, or practical difficulties, or passing phases of emotional development. Yet, all of these groups are, paradoxically, discussed by politicians of all parties (and the media) as though they were fixed communities with specific interests - even though their distinguishing characteristic is precisely their lack of permanence.
It is said that the priorities of government and the tax-and-benefit system must address the needs of those who "choose to adopt lifestyles" which do not conform to the norm of the two-parent family, as if these varying domestic arrangements were always the result of a premeditated decision to create a new social order. There are professional agitators who wish to count every domestic arrangement consisting of any collection of people other than parents with children, as fodder for their anti-family campaigning. They argue that the conventional home of married-parents-raising-children is now limited to a minority of households. They fail to point out that this is to do with lengthening lifespans and economic freedom: young single people can afford to leave home and the elderly are more likely to maintain separate households from their grown-up children. At both ends of their lives, such people contribute to the "non-traditional" household statistic even though they will, or have already, passed through a traditional family life.
Even some of the more credible candidates are dubious recruits to the dogmatic anti-traditional camp. Cohabiting couples who believe positively in the value of marriage but are hesitant about the staying power of their present relationships - a category which includes a great many people under the age of 30 - are caught up willy-nilly in this partisan game of special pleading. Their present arrangements are frozen in what statisticians call a snapshot of a constantly shifting pattern. Of course it is true that fewer people than ever believe that such living arrangements are morally wrong, but that is not the same thing as saying that there are large swathes of the population who see traditional marriage as outmoded - or that anyone living in a non-traditional relationship must be party to a cohesive, considered anti-traditional philosophy of life.
Most people do eventually marry, and the overwhelming majority of children are still living with both their natural parents, whatever phases or stages those parents may have passed through on their way to this conventional end. The economic independence of the young (particularly the female young) means that the path by which most men and women arrive at marriage and parenthood can be longer and more various, and there is more scope for stopping short of the conventional destination. But every unmarried couple who are living together should not be counted as committed members of the Alternative Lifestyle Party.
The danger in all of this is not just that government provision might be skewed in ways that seriously misjudge the true needs of the population. Government and Opposition politicians now address the electorate as if the most important fact about any voter was his or her sexual behaviour - on the insistence of strident activists who know that being part of a minority culture is their best route to power. The personal has become political in the most pernicious possible way.
