Our Civil Burden

So that's that, then. The Burden sisters, elderly spinsters who share a house and are demanding the same inheritance rights as civil partners, cannot have them through the courts. The onus is now on Parliament, which means on each and every one of us.

The failure of the original legislation to provide for a civil partnership (which already does not need to be consummated) between unmarried close relatives proves, as if proof were needed, that the point of that measure was to privilege homosexuality on the specious basis that it is an identity comparable to ethnicity or class, or even to sex (which is written into every cell of the body).

That legislation must be amended immediately to allow unmarried relatives, whether of the same or of opposite sexes, to register their partnerships.