Letters Of The Day: Love Thy Neighbour

SIR – Many of those who voted in favour of legalising same-sex marriage in the Republic of Ireland will have been Catholic.

The country has rejected an archaic and divisive form of Christianity in favour of one that follows Christ’s teaching to love thy neighbour.

Rebekah Reville Joy
Barnet, Hertfordshire

SIR – For the Church to pretend to have always been the guardian of marriage is disingenuous, since for the first millennium it did not even have a ceremony to celebrate it.

Some Christian groups expressly forbade it, and while the pre-Reformation church accepted the need for reproduction, it always placed celibacy on a higher moral plain.

Rev Dr John Cameron
St Andrews, Fife

SIR – Edward Thomas (Letters, May 24) asks why the rights of a gay couple should outweigh those of a Christian family business. Only someone who has not had to endure many years of stigmatisation due to a state of being beyond their choosing would ask such a question.

What he should be asking is why Christians, who should surely know better, are still intent on perpetuating a situation where one part of the population is denied the same rights as the rest.

Gary Spring
Southgate, Glamorgan

The Sunday Telegraph.