(non)Marriage Equality

January 21, 2016 8:03 PM

Couple to begin court fight against ban on heterosexual civil partnerships Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, who describe themselves as feminists and reject marriage as a “patriarchal” institution, will pursue their claim against the government’s equalities office on Tuesday. The case is being brought on the grounds that the refusal to allow them to participate in a civil partnership amounts to discrimination, breaching their right to family life under article 8 of the European convention on human rights.

The current inequality in civil partnerships is not sustainable. The institution already exists, and we know that civil partnership remains the first choice of a sizeable minority of same-sex couples (17% of same-sex couples have chosen civil partnership over marriage since its introduction in March 2014). Like these same-sex couples, there are many opposite-sex couples that do not wish to marry and feel civil partnerships better reflect their relationships and values.

posted by modernnomad (34 comments total)

maybe I'm being obtuse here, but glomming onto a separate but equal artifact is a strange act of rebellion.
posted by Ferreous at 8:09 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Does seem odd that if civil partnerships still exist as an option for same-sex couples (after marriage equality was achieved) that they should be denied to heterosexual couples. I have successfully avoided marriage, but were I so inclined, I would certainly be more amendable to a civil partnership. The thought of all the ridiculous legal, bureaucratic hurdles you have to jump just to keep your own goddamn name is reason enough to go the CP route.
posted by pjsky at 8:23 PM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

The thought of all the ridiculous legal, bureaucratic hurdles you have to jump just to keep your own goddamn name is reason enough to go the CP route.

This must depend on where one lives; what I saw was that a name change took extra work (especially for all of the documents like passport, drivers license, and so on) than would have not changing a name. There must be many places where the reverse is true, though.

It does seem that either civil partnership should disappear with marriage equality, or it should be extended to everyone.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:33 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

This must depend on where one lives
Yes, I am sure this is true.
posted by pjsky at 8:40 PM on January 21, 2016

Is there a good description of the difference between civil partnership and marriage in England/UK?

I mean my initial reaction is to wonder why keep civil partnership at all now that there is marriage equality, but this article doesn't actually describe the legal differences or potential advantages of one or the other.
posted by thefoxgod at 8:42 PM on January 21, 2016

Gov.uk has published a "comparison of civil partnership and marriage for same sex couples". It's a Word document, though, so here's a review of the major differences in Gay Star News. For one thing, civil partnerships lack certain rights, like those involving pensions and travel.

Also:

Unlike marriages, consummation is not a legal requirement of civil partnerships.

Does this mean a couple has to affirm that they've consummated before they can get married? Or that they're expected/required to do so shortly afterwards? I can't imagine how this could be enforced.
posted by Rangi at 9:01 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

Rangi: It's more that a lack thereof can be grounds for a divorce.

I have to admit, this is probably a good way to draw attention to the absurdity of having a separate-but-equal marriage like artifact for same-sex couples.
posted by Jilder at 9:09 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is equivalent to the white guy who heard about Rosa Park's arrest and said "Hey, _I_ want to sit at the back of the bus." What absolute garbage people.

So the 17% of same-sex couples in the UK that continue to opt for civil partnership rather than marriage now both are available to them are what? Self-loathing?
posted by modernnomad at 9:24 PM on January 21, 2016 [11 favorites]

This is equivalent to the white guy who heard about Rosa Park's arrest and said "Hey, _I_ want to sit at the back of the bus." What absolute garbage people.

I get where you're coming from, and I do feel like this situation has the aura of attention grab. But if the back of the bus had some actual benefits that exist outside of its stigma, that might eventually become something worth talking about. Civil Partnerships are a good thing, overall - if you ask me, the government should ONLY administer civil partnerships (to anyone who wants them, with no tax benefits, thus removing the main issue with polygamy and allowing that to happen) and leave marriage as solely a community thing.

If more people demand civil partnerships/civil unions instead of marriages, it could be a step in a direction that is overall freer for everyone (no legal marriages at all, but legal civil unions for ALL life partners of any arrangement.)
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 9:51 PM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

They hope for a new way for all couples to be able to formalise their commitment to one another without the historical “baggage” of marriage, and to be able to enter into an institution which has always strived to be inclusive, rather than excluding minority groups

If Peter Tatchell is for it and the Tories are against it, then odds are favourable that it's a good thing!
posted by asok at 9:58 PM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm all for this. Equal treatment for all.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:10 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

Step 1. Roll eyes.
Step 2. Evade the lawsuit by changing the law as they requested.
Because they are right and the law is wrong, and whoever wrote that law dun goofed.

But the law grants you the right to roll your eyes if necessary, while you fix the law.

(In many (most?) countries, civil unions were available to everyone from the start, and if my friends are anything to go by, quite popular with heterosexual couples.)
posted by anonymisc at 11:42 PM on January 21, 2016

I like the availability of this option. Why not? Who's injured?

Maybe eventually we can make civil unions or domestic partnership the default, amend the various family and probate codes, and let religions worry about who's 'married...'
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:03 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

The reason civil parternships are not open to heterosexual couples is pure politics. When initially introduced they were specifically there as a way for gay couples to have something that sounded like marriage but wasn't, thus making the church happy. But when gay marriage was being legalised a lot of people said it would make sense for straight people to have access to civil partnerships.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, gay marriage was passed under a conservative premiership, and conservatives have a value that says "marriage is good, conservatives support marriage", so David Cameron's argument was, essentially, that he wanted more people to be married, and adding civil partnerships for straight couples would mean less people were married, which would be bad. His actual words "undermine the sanctity of marriage".

I think it's always impressive how the conservatives can take something that is a good (letting gay couples marry) and somehow manage to fuck it up.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:35 AM on January 22, 2016 [5 favorites]

Why do they feel that marriage is a patriarchal institution? Are men granted more rights in a marriage? Is it all about the name change? Because you don't have to do that, and I've even heard of men taking their wife's name or them both having both names. In Quebec the norm is that the wife keeps her maiden name. It's actually way more of a pain to change it all. But ever since I signed the little paper in city hall 17 years ago, I have never once felt that my marriage gave my husband something more than it did for me. We did it for civil reasons, we are not religious people.
posted by Hazelsmrf at 1:21 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

A union which requires only differently gendered partners to have sex in order to justify the legal protections of partnership is inherently heteronormative and, in the context of a patriarchal society, a tool for enforcing the sexually objectified status of women.

Are there bigger issues? Yes. Is this the hill I'd choose to die on? No. But I understand why it matters to them and I'm not going to criticise people for fighting a petty injustice that stops them living the life they want.
posted by howfar at 2:29 AM on January 22, 2016 [9 favorites]

For what it's worth, the Civil Solidarity Pact (PACS) in France is open to everyone regardless of gender and is mostly used by opposite-sex couples. In fact, the original project was about same-sex unions as a substitute for marriage, but politicians did not want to get involved in that because GAY!!!! (that was the early 1990s), so activists deliberately repackaged it as a general purpose union for opposite-sex couples who did not want to be married, same-sex-but-not-gay couples (an often given example was that of a couple of ageing, long-time same-sex friends living together) and, well, same-sex-and-in-love couples.
posted by elgilito at 3:39 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have a colleague who is running into this problem at the moment. She doesn't want to participate in having a marriage because of the traditional social and religious baggage associated with the institution. She would be much more happy having a civil partnership with all the rights and responsibilities of marriage, but wants to make a statement and a distinction that she does not want to participate in the traditional marriage institution. She is annoyed that she's not allowed to call her partnership what she wants to.

It's the principle of the thing.
posted by the_wintry_mizzenmast at 4:13 AM on January 22, 2016 [9 favorites]

Thanks for this thread - up until now, the whole campaign did seem a bit 'but when is it WHITE History Month?' or at least on a par with the people who want to have an English Parliament. After all, we do have non-religious/doctrinal marriage here - you can have a civil ceremony at the registry office.

Reading these comments - and being wary of the whole fuss and expectations surrounding deciding to get married - I'm coming round to it.
posted by mippy at 4:48 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

up until now, the whole campaign did seem a bit 'but when is it WHITE History Month?'

I think I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the straight people acting all put upon that they couldn't have a civil partnership pre-2014. The rational part of me is thinking "we've got this somewhat surplus thing lying around, let's use it to challenge the baggage of 'marriage' a bit" (see Peter Tatchell's comment), but the emotional part of me has hang ups. I also wonder if the 17% of same-sex couples opting for civil partnerships would be mirrored in opposite-sex couples or if the overwhelming majority of people who've always assumed they'd get married would just get married because they've never thought about what 'marriage' means societally.
posted by hoyland at 5:06 AM on January 22, 2016

I would never in a million years choose this as a hill to make a legal stand on, but I'll cop to being someone in an opposite-sex relationship (though not a heterosexual relationship, ain't no one straight in my house except maybe the cats and I'm not even sure about them) who would love to see a civil union option. I don't want marriage for a variety of reasons (some legitimate, some I'll quite readily cop to as being fairly dumb), and have replaced it with some assorted legal documents and registering my partner as a domestic partner at work for health insurance reasons. Homebrew DIY civil union, more or less, and I sure wish there were an easier, more readily recognized option.

But I mean, in my imaginary world where I make the rules, civil unions would also be a thing available to close friends, family members, poly families - any group of people who want to commit to making a long-term life together and have some specific legal rights and responsibilities to go with that. They wouldn't be solely or perhaps even primarily about who's fucking. So I'm not holding my breath on the world turning out the way I want it anytime soon.
posted by Stacey at 6:10 AM on January 22, 2016

Rangi: It's more that a lack thereof can be grounds for a divorce.

Actually, lack thereof can be grounds for an annulment. A divorce states that two people were married, but no longer are. An annulment states that two people were never actually married. In societies where getting married multiple times is severely restricted, the fact that you were, in the eyes of the law/church, never married means those laws don't affect your ability to marry.
posted by eriko at 6:23 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Why do they feel that marriage is a patriarchal institution? Are men granted more rights in a marriage? Is it all about the name change?

Things must be really different in Quebec, I guess. As an American who has been married (later divorced), and later in a long-term domestic (heterosexual) partnership where both of us strongly resist marrying, I can bitterly testify that when you are married you are treated very differently by family and friends (labels matter much more than you might expect) and by the law -- and that when you are in a domestic partnership you have to jump through all kinds of legal hoops even to approximate the kind of rights and protections (property ownership and inheritance, medical proxy and even visitation rights, benefits offered through a spouse's job benefits, etc.) that are taken for granted for those who are married. One discriminatory example among many is that I could not take a block of time off my job under the FMLA a couple years ago to care for my partner during several out-of-town health procedures; had we been legally married, this would have been a trivial approval.

My partner and I shouldn't have to detail all the reasons why we resist entering into an institution grounded in religion and the historical ownership and control of women by men, and explain our own experiences of how fucked up it still is from a social perspective, and prove that even though we prefer not to label each other "husband" and "wife" we nonetheless love each other, are committed to each other's well-being, and plan to spend the rest of our lives together - in order to insure our shared assets pass easily to the other if one of us were to die, or that either of us would be in charge of serious health care decisions for the other if the loved one was unable. There should be a contractual union that offers all the legal partnership rights appropriate for those who cohabit, and independently there should exist the social and religious marriage ceremony that people can either choose to perform or not.
posted by aught at 6:53 AM on January 22, 2016 [9 favorites]

"Does this mean a couple has to affirm that they've consummated before they can get married?"

Premarital sex: It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
posted by el io at 7:13 AM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

In my view, the biggest problem with all of this is the word "marriage" and the centuries-long accretion of religious, political and social meanings that has grown up around it. If a state were to change the name of the legal document from "Marriage Certificate" to something like "Certificate of Union" but keep all the rights and responsibilities the same, it seems to me that they would solve the issue for most people. Of course, the religious types would complain just as much as they did when same-sex marriage was legitimized, but eventually people would understand that religious marriage and civil union are not the same thing. One is done by a religious institution for religious purposes, and has no bearing on legal rights and responsibilities, and one is done by the state for legal purposes, and has no bearing on religious legitimacy or standing. Personally, I think it would be unworkably complicated for a government to offer a wide variety of pre-configured "rights and responsibilities packages" for those wishing to solemnize their partnerships under the law, and so I don't have a problem with a state deciding that there is a simple either/or legal choice between being un-partnered with these rights and responsibilities, or being partnered with these other rights and responsibilities.
posted by slkinsey at 7:15 AM on January 22, 2016

As others have pointed out, civil unions often did not in practice live up to the rights of marriage. So if we did actually get to a place where unions and marriages had the exact same legal rights and responsibilities... I don't see why the government would bother with the complexities of having two truly equal but separate institutions. I suspect that of the two, if it was really pushed, social conservatives would rather see "marriage" enshrined as the one legal recognition, even if it meant letting the gays in, than having just civil unions.
posted by nakedmolerats at 7:32 AM on January 22, 2016

Before national marriage equality happened, I advocated for the state/government getting out of the marriage business altogether so that as far as the state was concerned, no one gets married, they have civil unions/partnerships instead.

Your church says same-sex marriage can't be a thing? No problem, they aren't married, it's a civil partnership. As far as your church is concerned, that same-sex couple isn't married. But they ARE in a civil partnership and you are legally required to recognize that.

You don't believe in marriage but you want to live with another person with all the benefits that a traditional marriage entails? Great, don't get married, enter into a civil partnership.

You're a traditional hetero couple that wants to get married in a church? Awesome, do everything the same as you do now. Your church calls it a wedding, the state calls it a civil partnership ceremony.

This would also involve removing marriage benefits since marriages aren't the state's business and don't exist as far as the government is concerned.

I still think it's a good idea (if largely unnecessary now) and it would have avoided this problem.
posted by VTX at 7:51 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Things must be really different in Quebec, I guess.

They are. Quebec has a long history of strong protections for non-married couples, including de facto (or common-law) unions and civil unions (which are not equivalent). The legal protections such couples enjoy are not very comparable to other parts of Canada, let alone internationally. Not marrying in Quebec is seen as a political statement, against the patriarchy of a society and government long dominated by the Catholic Church.
posted by bonehead at 10:37 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

Seems like we should just go all the way and get the government out of marriage and civil unions altogether. Why should any two people of any combination of age/sex/gender receive preferential treatment in the form of tax breaks, etc.?
posted by fraxil at 12:05 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

ban marriage
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:50 PM on January 22, 2016

Yay for Quebec! We decided to get married but my brother and his girlfriend decided to not. They have 2 daughters together, they are just as committed as my husband and I are, but the government does not really treat them any differently than if they had gotten married. There ARE some differences though, but mostly it's comparable.
posted by Hazelsmrf at 7:06 PM on January 22, 2016

Seems like we should just go all the way and get the government out of marriage and civil unions altogether.

Impossible. Government could certainly claim to have gotten out of marriage, but government would just as certainly come back in. Couples would still make marriage agreements. Government would need to interpret and enforce those agreements and create policies about what people are allowed to agree to. If government didn't impose some order on the situation, then people would have various different kinds of marital statuses which would be so chaotic and unpredictable as to give rise to ... more litigation. Government always finds a way to get involved.
posted by John Cohen at 9:12 PM on January 22, 2016

If government didn't impose some order on the situation, then people would have various different kinds of marital statuses which would be so chaotic and unpredictable as to give rise to ... more litigation. Government always finds a way to get involved.

In a way this already occurs with prenuptials (and random vow choices). And of course, because breakups can and do occur, lawyers get involved.
posted by el io at 9:28 PM on January 22, 2016

UPDATE: They lost their case: "Mrs Justice Andrews said the government was "acting well within the ambit of discretion afforded to it with regard to the regulation of social matters".

"Opposite-sex couples are not disadvantaged by the hiatus, because they can achieve exactly the same recognition of their relationship and the same rights, benefits and protections by getting married, as they always could," she said in her ruling.

She concluded: "The government's decision to wait and see serves the legitimate aim of avoiding the unnecessary disruption and the waste of time and money that plunging into a programme of legislative reform without waiting is likely to produce.""
posted by marienbad at 4:37 AM on January 29, 2016