Doug PollardFour Weddings And A Rally
July 27th 2009 00:12
Sometime next year I’ll be in the UK for my niece’s wedding. She’s been with her partner for six years, and they have three children together. They both work casually or on short term contracts for multiple employers. They’ll get married at a local church, not because they’re religious, but because my niece wants a white wedding with all the trimmings, and churches look so nice in the photos.
My sister lived with Mum and Dad until she married a boy she was at school with. They waited until they had their first house before starting a family. At first they both worked, but she’s now the principal breadwinner and he’s a househusband. They had a full white wedding, Rolls Royce bridal car and all, in a church neither of them had ever attended.
My mother met my father when she was the barmaid at the local pub. He married her and took her to live with his parents. Within a year they had their first child – me. He thought it was a husbands job to earn enough to support his wife and children, and forbade her to work. She ignored him and worked anyway. They were married at the local church, which was the centre of social life in the neighbourhood.
Gary and Steve have been together fifteen years. Steve is the principal breadwinner but Gary works too. This week they’ll get ‘civil partnershipped’ at a Registry Office in an English seaside town. Although Steve is a devout Christian, the law won’t allow them to ‘marry’ in a place of worship.
Four marriages, different in detail but identical in essentials. Or so it seems on the surface.
The UK Citizens Advice bureau found that calling legally recognised same sex relationships ‘civil partnerships’ rather than marriages (even though they’re legally almost identical), “reinforces the privilege and legitimacy of heterosexual relationships over and above homosexual relationships. . . . [and] locates civil partnerships outside of mainstream society.” Separate but equal isn’t equal.
Despite antidiscrimination laws, some UK and international businesses still display confusion over when and how to treat civil partners identically to married couples – and using those laws to tackle this is slow, cumbersome and expensive.
If these ‘functionally equal’ couples step outside the UK, they cease to be equal at all. When Steve and Gary travel, they’ll be married in Canada, Domestic Partners in New Jersey, and in many places their relationship won’t exist at all. When my sister and her husband travel, their relationship is unambiguous, their rights and obligations the same. Everyone understands what marriage is.
Advocates for Civil Partnerships in Australia argue that we need them as a stepping stone on the way to equal marriage, so people can see that ‘the sky won’t fall.’ Tosh. The sky has not fallen in Belgium, South Africa, Canada, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden or Norway.
Society has not collapsed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Iowa. There is no need to repeat the experiment.
Current Labor Policy says:
Labor will ensure that all couples who have a mutual commitment to a shared life do not suffer discrimination because they are not married. Labor will take action to ensure the development of nationally consistent, state-based relationship recognition legislation that provides the opportunity for couples who have a mutual commitment to a shared life to have those relationships registered and certified. This legislation will:
• Be based on the schemes that exist in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria.
• Not create schemes that mimic marriage or undermine existing laws that define marriage as being between a man and a woman.
Already Tasmanian Labor has ditched this mealy-mouthed waffle in favour of unambiguous support for marriage equality: Federal Labor needs to do the same.
No more states have shown any appetite for enacting ‘state-based’ schemes – they rightly see this as a federal matter.
On Saturday Supergirly (Lulu McClatchy) and I will MC the Equal Love Rally at Federation Square, one of many across Australia to call on the Labor Party, which is holding its annual conference at the time, to legislate for equal marriage. If you’re happy to be a second-class citizen, by all means stay home. But I hope we’ll see you there.
Doug presents Freshly Doug every Thursday 9-noon on Joy 94.9 www.joy.org.au. Feel free to call 61 3 9699 2949, write onair@joy.org.au, or sms 0427JOY949 during the show to agree/disagree!!
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