Just as religious material has no place in civil marriage ceremonies, so it has no place in civil partnership ceremonies. If you want hymns and Bible readings at your wedding, then get married in church. If you want hymns and Bible readings at your civil partnership ceremony, then have your civil partnership blessed in church.
Yes, you read aright. The simple correction of a defect in the original legislation would make this perfectly plausible. Civil partnerships already do not need to be consummated. There has never been any such need. So what have they to do with homosexuality, as such, really? Yet the legislation fails to provide for unmarried close relatives. That is proof, as if proof were needed, that the point of this measure is 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.
The legislation must be amended immediately to allow unmarried relatives, whether of the same or of opposite sexes, to register their partnerships. Then there would be no problem. If it had said that at the time of its enactment, then there would never have been anything more than a few newspaper stories about how same-sex couples were "planning to make use of a new law to protect elderly unmarried relatives living together from inheritance tax when one of them dies". So why wasn't it set up like that? See above, I'm afraid.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
So... you're saying that civil partnerships were explicity designed for gay couples?
ReplyDeleteThat's a fairly radical interpretation. Did anyone say anything suggesting this at the time?
Except that they weren't. They don't need to be consummated. So why are they restricted to unrelated same-sex couples? If they hadn't been, then the Daily Mail or whoever would barely have noticed them. And unrelated same-sex couples could still have had them. But so could all sorts of other people.
ReplyDeleteJeffrey John is a celibate in a civil partnership and has been for as long as he's been in it. You can't do that in a marriage, it can be annulled. Not dissolved, annulled - never really existed.
ReplyDeleteA homosexually inclined celibate was the very high profile Bishop of Southwark throughout the 1960s and 1970s, so it would be nothing new there. The only problem with Jeffrey John is his civil partnership. And the only problem with civil partnerships is that they are as they are, as set out here, rather than as they could and should be, as also set out here.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how to break this to you, David, but civil partnerships were always intended - solely intended - for gays to "marry". That's why they're restricted to unrelated same-sex couples. Because they're gay marriage by another name. You're right that there's been a ridiculous fudge over consummation, but that doesn't change the fact that they were intended as gay marriage, they're understood as gay marriage and they're accepted as gay marriage.
ReplyDeleteThis idea that they're a failed attempt to provide legal recognition for a whole host of non-hetero-marriage relationships is a chimera. Let it go. They're not as good at providing gay marriage as gay marriage would be, but that's their one job and they're doing it fairly well.
Mervyn Stockwood was Welsh, too.
ReplyDeleteIt must be something in the water.
ReplyDeleteBaring, look out for an entire post later this afternoon.