Tim Loughton MP: If you're gay, you can have a civil partnership. But if you're straight, you can't. What's equal about that?
Tim Loughton is the Member of Parliament for East Worthing and Shoreham, and was Parliamentary Under Secretary for Children and Families from 2010 until 2012. Follow Tim on Twitter.
David Burrowes set out the stall for those of us who have opposed the Same Sex Marriage Bill in his excellent piece for Conservative Home on Monday. It remains to be seen whether tentative steps by the Government to introduce limited safeguards against some of the many concerns that we raised in committee about those in public service with conscience objections finding themselves out of a job will actually hold water.
However, there is one amendment to the Report Stage of the Bill which I have tabled for next week around which opponents and supporters of the principle of same sex marriage can all rally. It addresses a real inequality that will be created if the Bill becomes law. A specially commissioned opinion poll coming out over the weekend indicates strong support for the change across the House and outside the House. That change is to extend civil partnerships to opposite sex couples.
If same sex marriage becomes law, then gay couples will have the choice either to go for the newly acquired right to marry or to join a new civil partnership or maintain an existing one. Conversely opposite sex couples will only have the option to marry, albeit in a wider range of religious or civil institutions. A Bill which is being pushed through (wrongly in my view) as an equality measure will therefore actually create a new and substantial inequality.
If such couples are prepared to make the commitment and particularly to provide a more stable environment for their children, then surely they deserve parity of esteem with same sex couples who want a formal partnership without marriage? That is good for family stability, good for children, good for society and good for Conservatives to be promoting a more pragmatic and contemporary form of family values, even if they do not amount to full blown traditional marriage.
They need not be mutually exclusive and, frankly, this Government’s record on delivering practical measures to promote families so far has not exactly been gold-plated. In urging the Chancellor to stop prevaricating over our clear manifesto and Coalition Agreement to introduce transferable married tax allowances, I would also extend them to civil partnerships with children, same sex or now opposite sex.
This amendment would also address the common misconceptions that there is such a status as common-law wife or husband which somehow brings with it rights, only for women typically to lose out significantly when a partner dies. Even a couple who are engaged to be married in most cases have greater legal protection than a cohabiting couple.
Another interesting point which was made by a witness during the Committee stages of the Bill is that if you indicate you are in a civil partnership on a form or in a an interview, you are automatically revealing that you are gay. With civil partnerships available to all couples no such automatic admission of your sexuality is involved.
In the Government’s own consultation on the Bill, 61% of respondents said that opposite sex couples should be able to register a civil partnership. Oddly, the Government have not acted on their own consultation, and voted against this amendment when I pushed it to a vote in Committee. Ministers' defence of their position frankly lacked any substance, and now they are looking to detach civil partnerships from this Bill and conduct a further separate review. Frankly, that is the worst of all worlds. We don’t need yet another flawed review. If the Bill goes through, a new inequality will have been instituted and, perhaps worst of all, the issue of gay marriage which has done so much damage to our Party at just the wrong time, will linger on probably until the General Election.
I do not believe that there should be any further delay in bringing in these changes as part of this Bill now, underlining the tremendous success that civil partnerships have become since 2005. Whether you think this is a good Bill or a bad Bill let’s get shot of it one way or the other as soon as possible, and let’s at least get this bit of it right before creating yet another rod for our own backs.
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