Why are Gays Being Fobbed Off with Second Best?

KENILWORTH, 30 MARCH 2004 — Lesbian and gay couples are being fobbed off with second-best partnership rights, says the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA).

In anticipation of the publication tomorrow of a bill detailing the Government’s plans on civil partnership registration for same-sex couples, GALHA says that they should have been given full marriage rights in the same way that heterosexual couples are.

GALHA spokesperson Terry Sanderson said: “Why are gay couples required to sign a different register to everyone else? Why is the Government inventing a whole new structure of partnership registration when there is a perfectly good one in place already – called marriage? The Government makes great play about its efforts to give equality to gay people, yet it has gone to enormous lengths to avoid giving equality on this issue."

Mr Sanderson said that other countries in the European Union – Belgium and the Netherlands – have extended marriage rights to gay people, and in the United States there is a great conflict over what equality means in this area. “In the States the courts have said that nothing less than marriage is acceptable if the constitutional demands of equality for all citizens are to be upheld.”

Mr Sanderson believes that the reason the Government is afraid to offer full marriage rights to gay people is pressure from religious institutions.

He said: “We understand that religious organisations have a long way to go before they can offer marriage to gay people in churches, but the registration of marriages at a registry office is a completely secular process; there is no religious element to it, so no conflict arises. Why didn’t the Government simply say gays can register their marriages in the same way as heterosexuals can? It would have been much simpler in the end. As it stands, there is a clear two-tier system that creates a further division between gay and straight society.”

• GALHA’s response to the Government’s consultation on partnership rights is at http://www.galha.org/submission/2003_09.html