Approaching from the opposite direction
It's taken a long time to make it through the British legal system, but an important test case is due to begin this week. You may have heard about the fight by a lesbian couple to have their marriage (which took place in Canada) recognised in the UK. The outcome of this case could have interesting implications for our campaign.
In Canada, any couple are free to marry, whether heterosexual or homosexual - there is no distinction between different types of marriage or legal partnership. If this were the case in the UK, we would not need to run the Equal Partnership Campaign - there would be no more legal segregation on grounds of sex or sexuality, although presumably it would be too much to ask that the silly requirement of reciting 'declarations' out loud be abolished.
The test case - brought by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger - is challenging the bizarre situation whereby if a heterosexual couple are married in Canada, their marriage is recognised as a marriage in the UK, whereas a homosexual marriage contracted in Canada is magically transformed into a Civil Partnership under UK law.
If the couple succeed and the court decides that their marriage should be recognised as such, this would not mean that marriage has to be available to homosexuals in the UK, but it would mean that some gay couples in the UK would be married and some would be civil partners. This would highlight the absurdity of having two parallel systems bestowing the same legal rights.
This could eventually have the consequence that marriage would have to be made available to all. This would obviously be a far superior state of affairs to that which obtains at the moment. However, we believe that marriage has broader social, sexual and historical connotations than simple legal partnership - connotations which many heterosexuals currently reject, and which deter many principled couples from forming the legal commitment that they would like to have. In addition, we do have some sympathy with committed Christians and others who feel that marriage should be protected as a peculiarly spiritual relationship set apart from legal practicalities - though we maintain that this position is only defensible if a non-marriage legal partnership is available equally to everyone.
So while we wish Ms Wilkinson and Ms Kitzinger every success in their fight to expose absurdity and win recognition for their marriage, we also hope that their case - by highlighting the obvious nonsense of a two-tier system - will ultimately strengthen the case for civil partnerships, rather than marriage, being the universally accessible, morally neutral form of legal partnership in the UK.
In Canada, any couple are free to marry, whether heterosexual or homosexual - there is no distinction between different types of marriage or legal partnership. If this were the case in the UK, we would not need to run the Equal Partnership Campaign - there would be no more legal segregation on grounds of sex or sexuality, although presumably it would be too much to ask that the silly requirement of reciting 'declarations' out loud be abolished.
The test case - brought by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger - is challenging the bizarre situation whereby if a heterosexual couple are married in Canada, their marriage is recognised as a marriage in the UK, whereas a homosexual marriage contracted in Canada is magically transformed into a Civil Partnership under UK law.
If the couple succeed and the court decides that their marriage should be recognised as such, this would not mean that marriage has to be available to homosexuals in the UK, but it would mean that some gay couples in the UK would be married and some would be civil partners. This would highlight the absurdity of having two parallel systems bestowing the same legal rights.
This could eventually have the consequence that marriage would have to be made available to all. This would obviously be a far superior state of affairs to that which obtains at the moment. However, we believe that marriage has broader social, sexual and historical connotations than simple legal partnership - connotations which many heterosexuals currently reject, and which deter many principled couples from forming the legal commitment that they would like to have. In addition, we do have some sympathy with committed Christians and others who feel that marriage should be protected as a peculiarly spiritual relationship set apart from legal practicalities - though we maintain that this position is only defensible if a non-marriage legal partnership is available equally to everyone.
So while we wish Ms Wilkinson and Ms Kitzinger every success in their fight to expose absurdity and win recognition for their marriage, we also hope that their case - by highlighting the obvious nonsense of a two-tier system - will ultimately strengthen the case for civil partnerships, rather than marriage, being the universally accessible, morally neutral form of legal partnership in the UK.
posted by The editor at 2:15 pm
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