Wales is different in its morality

Thoughts from a Welsh parish
St Robert's Presbytery Coronation Street, Aberkenfig Mid Glamorgan August 3, 1990
A WELSHMAN hopes, naturally, that Wales is in several important respects different from England.
Calvinism, imposed on Wales from the 18th century, has been euphemistically called the "Welsh way of life" or in the words of Dr Thomas Charles Edwards, a Welsh Methodist leader of the 19th century, a narrow, arid and irrelevant theology. One would have thought that today the sexual morals of the Welsh would be on a much higher standard than the English. Alas, this is not the case, adultery is even more in fashion in Wales than in England, judging from the divorce statistics. And in these of course, if in nothing else, Britain leads Europe.
It would seem that Thatcherism in marriage reigns supreme in Wales and in England. By Thatcherism
marriage, I mean of course the free market in love.
Marriage has far more relevance to social justice than any other institution. It was designed to ration one man, one woman. The rich were always free in the old days to have more than one of everything, but when it came to husbands and wives, they were no better off than anyone else.
How different is the situation today, now there is a free market in love. Whereas it used to be rare for middle-aged men to divorce their innocent wives, so as to be able to marry someone more attractive, today
it is part of the normal social scene, just as it is normal for attractive young women to gravitate towards older men who have so much more to offer.
In a free sexual market this is bound to happen. Only very rigid rules, such as used to exist, could possibly prevent it. More and more middle-aged women are having their lives blighted and more and more young men are finding their possibilities of marriage are impaired by a shortage of young women who are otherwise engaged.
Surely this flies in the face of all conceptions of social justice; that it should be welcomed and indeed enthusiastically promoted by so called progressives, like those harsh critics of the recent International Congress of the Family held at Brighton, is staggering.
Monogamy is egalitarianism in the realm of love, and its replacement by what is, in effect, a disguised form of polygamy is reactionary and inhumane.
In Wales and in England we are creating a world fit only for managers of harems. For this is what many men are engaged in doing and more than others, they are grossly unsettling the balance of nature with results that deprive thousands of middle-aged divorcees and young men of the most basic human right the right to marry, or stay married.
Fr John Owen