Culturally, it seems a lifetime ago when the Catholic Church in Britain withdrew from its work in adoption and foster care after finding itself unable to conform to legal demands to assess same-sex couples as potential adopters and foster parents.
The bishops argued that the available evidence showed children flourished best in two-parent families established on marriage between a man and a woman.
A large number of potential same-sex parents willing to adopt children from care homes were promised by campaigners to justify the new policy. It is not likely that they ever materialised in substantial numbers, though some high-profile examples soon came into the public arena. Such a failure did not matter, of course, if the real point of the exercise was to equate same-sex unions with heterosexual marriages.
