SIR – Your front page headline (T&A, December 16) read: “Gay couple jailed for cruelty to child”. In other circumstances, would you have run a headline reading: “Straight couple jailed for cruelty to child”?

Fr Nicholas Clews, priest in charge, St James the Great, Woodhall and St Margaret of Antioch, Thornbury, The Vicarage, Galloway Lane, Pudsey

Editor’s note: “We would refer to ‘mum and dad’ in a headline which informs the reader of the gender of the subjects and their relationship to one another and to the victim in the same way gay does here. Gay is in no way a pejorative term and it is not used as one here.”