| We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to introduce
| Marriage Equality.
|
| http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Gay-Marriage/
|
| We ask the Prime Minister to bring in equality for all British
| citizens regardless of sexual orientation with regards to
| Marriage. This means extending the rights of same sex couples to
| become legally married as is legal in Canada, Belgium, 5 states
| of the USA, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Spain and South
| Africa. Civil Partnerships should also be open to heterosexual
| couples who do not necessarily want to get married.
|
| Equal but different is NOT equality. Love is Love.

Some homophobic and sexist idiot at No.10 has labeled the page “Gay marriage”

And if that is my problem, I am pleased to have it. I am also pleased to have my Civil Partnership, which you so glibly dismeiss as an institution and I suspect many others are also.

Since we clearly have different standards of polite communication I will now ignore you in the future. Insult away, I am not here to read it. You will be shouting into an empty room.

Actually, having been a campaigner for same-sex marriage and all other equality for 30 years, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Stonewall campaigned AGAINST same-sex marriage all along, and still do not back it.

When I questioned Sumerskill about it when the government first mentioned civil partnerships his response was of ridicule, which jarred very starkly in the international human rights context in which same-sex marriage had been a very hot issue ever since the Supreme Court of Hawai’i ruled that the anti-miscegenation ruling in the US Supreme Court, Loving-v-Virginia (1967) applied to a same-sex marriage (NB not homosexual marriage) license case (Baehr v. Lewin, 1963) brought to them on other grounds. Those judges were the first to point out that this was sex discrimination, which was against the state constitution, just as the Loving case had determined that barring “mixed-race” marriage was race discrimination, which was illegal. The Defence of Marriage Act was passed in reaction to that because the right-wing realised it was a killer argument.

By the time the civil partnerships bill was presented in the Commons, The Netherlands and Belgium had years of experience of enacted same-sex marriage with no problems, and Canada had it through a court case on the same grounds as the Hawai’i case – sex discrimination. There had been bitter campaigns in many jurisdictions, with every court case won, but many results overturned at the ballot box and civil partnerships were often handed out as a second-class substitute in the face of such legal situations (for example in Hawai’i and Vermont). Massachusetts was legally marrying. The fact that only equal access to marriage could answer the case for equality under the law was obvious.

It would have been easy to make that case here, but no effort was made, and the UK media maintained an odd silence in contrast to wild exposure of any (legally meaningless but opposition-stoking) “pink wedding” they could find or sponsor.

But anyone, anywhere, advocating less than equal access to marriage was clearly, by then, not a beliver in equality and had to be suspect. In parliament, UK government speakers made very clear that what they were enacting was based on their religious beliefs. A shadow figure, who never spoke was the minister responsible for the birth, deaths and marriage registers and the registrars – Opus Dei adherent and cilice-wearer, Ruth Kelly. Baroness Scotland was prominent on legal matters in the Lords.

I trust everyone remembers that Papal policy is against same-sex marriage at any price, and that Opus Dei is the papacy’s most ardent supporters. We also had our most Roman Catholic prime minister in centuries, who frequently talked with the Pope, who is obsessive on sexual minorities.

Summerskill is a life-long Labour insider and would work with rather than against a Labour government.

It was the minimum they could do in the face of the obligation under judgment in the European Court of Human Rights Goodwin-v-UK case which obligated the UK to have arrangements to recognise that sex reassignment surgery is a change of sex. This was going to create several same-sex marriages unless they invented some other status into which they could force such couples and which they could argue was sufficiently like marriage to be within their “margin of appreciation”. By following the example of right-wing legislators in the USA and providing civil partnerships they could, with the same stone, deal with the emotive and high profile instances of gay partners losing their homes after a partner died. Thus the Gender Recognition and Civil Partnership bills went through parliament as if hand-in-hand. Trans people were not consulted on civil partnerships but were told the huge proportion of their bill devoted to preventing same-sex marriages was because the government was totally set against any such thing. Somehow LGB people mostly imagined the government was giving them the most it could in the face of opposition, and bandied the term marriage, and wedding, around like confetti as if there was no difference.

Summerskill’s predecessor, Angela Mason, since a top government equality person in a succession of roles, would never even discuss marriage. Her background might predispose her to see same-sex marriage as undesirable aping of a heterosexual institution that oppresses women, yada, yada, yada…

Does Stonewall see same-sex marriage as ever desirable? In a long and serious political interview on BBCTv last year, one of Stonewall’s founding inner-circle, actor Simon Callow, could think of no objective yet to be achieved but to end homophobic bullying (and that was in Scotland where Stonewall claims to represent trans people too). On the other hand, Sir Ian Mckellen, who may have been the very first instigator of the launching of Stonewall, has explicitly said he sees no excuse why there should not be equal access to marriage, but he never mentions Stonewall in the same context. So I guess that means it is not on Stonewall’s agenda, ever.

Thus Stonewall announcing its intention of removing one of the complaints about civil partnerships – that creating them in religious premises is illegal – has to be seen as again trying to undermine the case, and pressure for equal access to marriage. That is especially the case since it would disarm the Quaker intention to celebrate same- and opposite-sex couples equally.

Tell that to my Dad, who got a ruler or cane rapped across his knuckles if he to write with his left hand.

I assume, but maybe I am wrong, that you would have preferred them to have rejected the CP compromise and fought on for marriage, back then. Had they done that, it is quite clear we still would not have been allowed to have a CP.

That might be your preference. It is for sure not mine.

I pause before personalising, but I think you are being a little ungracious about Stonewall and more so about the peers who got us CP. They both (and others) worked long and hard. I know people involved (some well)and it was a very tough task. Don’t belittle them, please, for doing their best.

Angelica, you raise some interesting and relevant points. The inequalities of CPs, PACs and other forms of EU same-sex unions is that none of them are uniform or universal in the rights each conveys. For example, CPs bestow almost all of the rights of marriage, but other unions such as PACs offer very few rights and privileges inherent in marriage and certainly not nearly as much as CPs do. That’s the problem with them. If the EU mandated CPs across the board for everyone, then that would be a fairer situation, but it doesn’t, nor do I see that ever happening. What the EU could do as a first step towards marriage for same-sex couples is to do what the seven countries and states in America are doing, ergo…recognising same sex marriages performed elsewhere for what they are. If a British gay couple gets married in Holland, Belgium, Spain, Norway or Sweden, their marriage should and must be recognised as such upon return to the UK irrespective of the ban on same-sex marriage. I think that’s terribly unfair and offensive. The EU needs to change that, sooner rather than later.

I’m currently a resident of New York state were we have domestic partnerships in some parts of the state and the city of New York, similar to civil partnerships, but….same-sex marriages are officially recognised in the state as marriages, NOT downgraded to domestic partnerships which they clearly are not, and rightly so. Our government is pigheaded and very regressive on this one. Its going to fire back on the government sooner or later as more countries get on board.

A good forum to discuss this would be in the “My” space section on this site

http://my.pinknews.co.uk/

Angelica please take a moment to read what I have constantly said here, which is that I would also have preferred marriage; but it was never to be. (By never I mean then; maybe in the future, had the campaigners waited and tried again, it would have been, but what a risk to take and no CP in the interim).

So instead we got CP. Not perfect, not marriage, but something and when you think back to where we were ten years ago, a bloody fantastic something. That surely must be the key point here. And I, for one, am grateful for it.

Yes, i know there are some anomolies; I know about the pension backdating issue (though I understand most pension trustees exercise discretion). I know that a handful of countries deny some rights on technical grounds (but those like France will have to stop this nonesense when the EU makes them – it’s being looked at now). And I also know there are a couple of back-dating issues (which by the way also apply to marriage).

But come on! Compare that to the void, the nothing, we would have had if Stonewall and the peers in the Lords who fought for us (this battle was fought in the Lords, not the Commons, don’t forget) had held back as suggested by some. Would you really, honestly, have preferred to have had no CP, as a matter of principle? And waited until when? The next government would have not been in any rush to promote CPs had it not been already done – so, when?

On the suggestion that we now campaign for marriage, I agree. I am right behind that – where do I sign? I want full equality as much as anyone else who has posted for that here. I agree it’s an important principle, and we should go for it. We should treat CPs as an incremental step and move on to the next one. If anyone who has called me negative has misunderstood me as saying otherwise, maybe I have not in the past been clear, but I hope I have now.

Now, is Big Bouncing Brian Burton going to admit he was wrong when he asserted that recognising a mixed-sex couple for a CP was a breach of rules and not the law? Of course not, that would require honesty and and a little thought.

http://www.alternativefamilylaw.co.uk/en/gay-lesbian/civil-partnership.htm

On the claim that marriage wasn’t on the table and it was either CPs or nothing, I’ve never really disputed that. If the government had gotten behind it then yes I think it would have been possible, the government forced an equal age of consent through after it being voted down in the Lords so they could have done the same with marriage equality. However I’m aware that at the time the CPA was passed only 2 countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) had gay marriage, so it would have been a bold move.

However times have changed and more countries, like Sweden and Norway, have abandoned CPs and moved on to full marriage equality. I don’t criticise anyone for campaigning for CPs at the time they did but what I do object to is to those (like the government and even Stonewall) who say that CPs are an acceptable permanent compromise which provide enough equality so that gays don’t really need the right to marry.

Actually, come to think about it, please justify the general inferiority of CPs, by reference to checked facts! I think you will be hard pressed.

And yet again, which would you prefer, CP, or nothing. That was the choice? There was never a choice of CP or marriage. Sure, criticise ourselves if you want, for accepting second best. Since best was not available, I think we (they, really, most of did bugger all) did pretty well in what they got. Nothing self loathing about that, or pathetic. Is there?