Thursday 26 June 2008

Keeping Things Civil

This year's fifty per cent reduction in civil partnerships arises from the failure of the original legislation to provide for such (which already do not need to be consummated) between unmarried close relatives.

That was proof, as if proof were needed, that the point of that measure was 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).

That 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 rather more of them.

4 comments:

  1. Is it possible that the fifty per cent reduction arises from the fact that, at first, there was a very large backlog of gay and lesbian men and women who wished to have a civil partnership, and that this meant that a disproportionate number of people used their new rights in the initial period after introduction? You'd surely expect uptake to be highest at the start, and to skew the figures.

    There are now far fewer gay couples who have wanted legal recognition for many years and have been unable to get it, and so we're getting to a much more realistic annual figure.

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  2. Or, to put it another way, an extremely small annual figure.

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  3. Which rather begs the question of why people like you bang on about the subject at such inordinate length.

    It's a big deal for gay couples. It's a piddlingly insignificant deal for everyone else. So why keep bringing it up?

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  4. "It's a piddlingly insignificant deal for everyone else."

    No, having been set up as it is, rather than as I set out, it looks dangerously (and deliberately) like an alternative form of legal marriage. Making it a very "big deal" for society as a whole.

    But the whole problem would easily be solved by the reform that I suggest.

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