CHRISTMAS is a time when families come together – we saw folk struggling to get home during the dreadful weather leading up to Christmas Eve. At the Midnight Service in my church the vicar reminded us of Christ's birth and the struggle his mother and father had getting shelter.

The senior Roman Catholic in England and Wales, The Arch Bishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, used his Christmas message to soundly criticise David Cameron for his undemocratic and "Orwellian" "push" for same sex marriage, a sentiment echoed by Judge Sir Paul Coleridge (head of a charity that combats marriage breakdown) when in the Conservative Manifesto Cameron prom­ised support for marriage and the family. To date neither he nor this wretched coalition nor the Church of England have given any time or thought to the breakdown of families.

The 'Coalition for Marriage' petition has over 600,000 signatures of support! (Google C4M).

I agree with David Davies, Tory MP for Monmouth, most parents would prefer their children not to be gay, seeing future parenthood as very fulfilling for their children and for themselves as grandparents. The "family line" is as important to Mr and Mrs Joe Bloggs as it is, say, to Lord and Lady Grantham!

Certainly we all get a bit hot under the collar when discussing care for the elderly costing so much that the family home has to be sold and the children (or more particularly the grandchildren) can't "inherit". Does Cameron ever do any joined-up thinking? Or is it a series of boxes which he ticks or crosses off a list? Certainly major items from the Manifesto (his only legitimate mandate for action) keep being kicked into touch.

I firmly believe that marriage is "the legal union of a man and a woman in order to live together and often to have children" as it says in my Concise Oxford Dictionary which state has hitherto been sanctified in church or the Registry Office!

Was it Shakespeare who wrote "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet?" Well, taking that as a simile, same sex union whichever way one looks at it can never be a marriage. Why "push" for it David Cameron??Conservatives didn't vote it in.

– Pauline E. Civil, Tutshill.