Do you know how many times I’ve described myself as civilly partnered in the last six years? In fact do you know how many times I’ve been asked if I’m civilly partnered in that time? Or how many times friends have asked how my civil partner is rather than husband? I could probably count them on all on one hand. We are married, we are each others husbands and quite frankly what Lord Carey thinks on the issue means nothing to me.
Having separate legal terms for the same thing is to all intents and purposes segregation. Some may ask if I believe this, then why did I enter into a civil partnership in the first place? Well bizarrely the legal jargon didn’t really phase me, I just wanted to celebrate my love and my relationship with the man I love. It was the best we had going at the time and still is, but that does not make it completely right. There is no such thing as equal but different, it’s either equality or it’s not.
In Holland they don’t call it gay marriage, or straight marriage, it’s just marriage. When I talk to my friends straight or gay we don’t give separate names to our relationships depending on the make up of who’s in it. Are you seeing someone? Do you love someone? Are you engaged? They just got married. No straight or gay to be found there, it’s not needed because what you are talking about is love.
I could write reams and reams reminding Lord Carey his church was essentially created so the monarch of the time could do behave like a Tudor Elizabeth Taylor and rack up successive numbers of wives. Or that the great traditions of marriage are clearly defined before pointing him the direction of his own good book which lists countless variations on the subject. Perhaps I could write about how quickie divorces mean people no longer think of marriage as the great institution it once was. I could also point out that no one is forcing Lord Carey to conduct a marriage between two men either. His religion can keep on defining marriage as it likes, and making amendments to it’s apparently set in stone traditions when it sees fit.
I could say so much on this subject, most of it already said by people far cleverer than me, but the fact is love between two adults is equal. The laws surrounding it currently aren’t. This isn’t political correctness gone mad, it’s equality. It isn’t about one side winning because the battle for equality can only ever end in a draw. So Lord Carey can spout his hate, he and those against equality and can say what they like. But while they do that let’s get on with making the law reflect what already happens.
No one gets down on bended knee and asks to be civilly partnered. When it goes wrong the people involved don’t say they’re getting a dissolution of civil partnership.
A rose by any other name may still smell as sweet, but legal rights by any other stink of segregation.
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