Civil Partnerships- prenuptial warm up act?

Recently I debated with the local Labour Parlimentary Candidate for Brighton Kemptown on the subject of civil parterships v gay marriage.

The debate was hosted by the local 180News and the full article features below.

Changing the law, as I know from my job, is of critical importance. However, while it's tempting to think that if we're kind to the law-makers, they'll give us what we want, the writing of the law is after all one hurdle, its application quite another.

Given that the entire history of rights for LGBTs has been one unrelentless offensive, I have a limited amount of time for a simple reliance on the legal route. Often, as was the case with the equal age of consent debate in the Houses of Parliament, the legal route is short sighted, and too many see it as the finish and not the start of the process. For example, are we seriously condeding that teenagers aren't having consensual sex with their peers before the age of 16?

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, this weekend, we only need to remember that no legislator has given LGBT people because they're nice people, they've been forced to deliver.

Interesting then to note that today, LGBT activists in Dublin have locked themselves onto the gates of The Irish Parliament (pictured above and here) called Leinster House to protest against watered-down gay marriage legislation, which will resemble the UK's Civil Partership legislation.

This was a golden opportunity for the Irish Government to lay down the strongest message to all those waiting in the wings to drag Ireland back to the days of the illegalisation of homosexuality. Further it would help puncture the arguments of the Tories and others in the UK by adopting legislation which mirrors that of Spain and Holland which gives full and equal marriage rights to lgbt people.

Solidarity with the Leinster House protesters!
****************************************************

full article with 180 follows beneath-


Civil Partnerships- prenuptial warm up act?

Just before I was asked to write this article the discussion came up at choir practice- one of our members was one half of the first civil partnership in Worthing while another stated that he wanted legislation protecting gay marriage before he would take it seriously.

Back in 2001, only the rumbles of this debate were beginning to be heard. The Green Party’s Darren Johnson, Chair of the London Assembly, first formulated the London Partnership Register, proposing the plan in his maiden speech to the Assembly. One of my friends, Clare, who worked for the Greater London Authority performed many partnerships on the top floor of City Hall. The idea was experimental and infectious-in its first year alone, 300 of the London partnerships were performed.

So infectious that Blair’s government gained the confidence to push forward Civil Partnership legislation in October 2004. First becoming law on 19 December 2005 in Northern Ireland, I will never forget the footage of Shannon Sickels and Gráinne Close at Belfast City Hall as Northern Ireland went from the last place in the UK to decriminalise homosexuality to the first hosting a civil partnership.

15,000 civil partnerships were performed between 2005 and 2006, and our Fair City has had the greatest number of civil partnerships registered in the UK, so what on earth could be up?

Civil marriage is a heterosexual marriage that happens to be performed in a civic building. The way the Labour government wrote the legislation means that civil partnerships must be an exclusively civil procedure and can’t be performed for example in a church.

The government bowed to the religious faiths who fought tooth and nail to have ‘doctrinal’ exemptions from the Sexual Orientation Regulations in 2003 and had their position strengthened by Ruth Kelly MP a government minister and member of Opus Dei.

Ironically civil partnerships create a form of sexual apartheid excluding opposite-sex partners, with one law for heterosexuals and another for the lgbt community. What is equally outrageous is that even if some of the progressive churches in our city want to marry same sex couples, they are forbidden from doing so by the law .

It would seem all of the religious faiths had a love-in, forgetting centuries of hatred for each other and sharing a joint hatred of us. If you thought the power of religions throughout the country had waned, you’d be wrong, and up until we challenge them, their faith will still come before our rights to be equal citizens. This is not equality. It is the reinforcement and perpetuation of discrimination.

The freshly re-elected Green MEPs for London, Jean Lambert and the South East, Caroline Lucas, are using their third terms in office to back calls for an end to the ban on same-sex marriage in the UK and in other EU member states.

As Most EU countries do not recognise the different same-sex partnership laws in other member states, we also want harmonised EU laws to incorporate a universally recognised system of civil marriage. Lesbian and gay married couples should be able to move freely around Europe and have their marriages recognised on exactly the same basis as heterosexual married couples. Anything less is second class and discrimination.

The recognition of same-sex marriages is a vital step towards ending legally-sanctioned homophobic discrimination. If the political establishment is serious about social justice, they must challenge religious faiths and allow laws for gay marriages and end another facet of the UK's institutional homophobia.

As for me? I might defend your right to get married, but given my recent track history with men I doubt I’ll be ordering the tuxedo any time soon.

Phelim Mac Cafferty is National Spokesperson for LGBTGreens, the LGBT human rights group in the Green Party of England and Wales

Phelimmacc@yahoo.co.uk

www.lgbtgreens.org.uk

www.greenparty.org.uk