All entries for Wednesday 10 November 2004

Homosexuality, Marriage and Civil Partnerships

Writing about Gay Marriage and the Civil Partnerships Bill from Reality Need Not Apply

I've just been reading Jordan's very good entry on the subject and I just felt the need to give my opinion on how it should (ideally?) be done.

Ok so Christians aren't usually in favour of the idea as it goes against what they see as marriage, which should be between a man and a women, and as far as i'm aware marriage is actually a metaphor for their union with god (something like that anyway, apolgies if i'm very wrong). I can understand how this is a problem for them.

I don't believe that civil partnerships should be allowed to extend to cover cohabiting relatives, this would just be a way of evading tax law. As Jordan said no-one was interested in this until the civil partnership idea for homosexuals came about. Why should two sisters living together be entitled to avoid inheritence tax when two sisters living apart wouldn't.

I would also like to point out that although civil partnerships are a step in the right direction they aren't pefect, they can still leave us being differentiated from a heterosexual couple. So my solution is this; a huge restructuring everything.

First thing, take away any legal status a marriage carries, make it purely a religious thing, if a couple wants to declare their love in an old fashioned religous way then thats fine. Then make civil partnerships available to all couples (hetero and homo) on the condtion that the two people aren't related, as those people are either practising incest or just wanting to avoid tax (there are a few exceptions to this but I won't go into them).

Once you have a civil partnership scheme that means a hetero couple and a homo couple have exactly the same legal rights then these civil partnerships can underlay marriage, so when you get married (which would be purely a religious thing) you also sign a civil partnership. For those not wanting a religious union (or unable to because of their beliefs) can get hitched at a registry office or other such licensed venues.

That way no-one can say we're destroying the sanctity of marriage as we technically wouldn't be getting married, it would become a purely religious event, so the church would be happy. We would have our equal rights so we'd be happy and everyone else that isn't happy should be shot!

Of course for this to actually work it would require people obtaining civil partnerships not to call it marriage, the word 'marriage' would have to have no legal meaning. Application forms would need to say 'Are you in a civil partnership?' as opposed to 'Are you married?' and 'Wife/Husband' would need to be replace with 'Partner' for politically correctness (although I'm not that bothered about being PC)

: 10 Nov 2004 16:42 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Being Politically Correct

I thing it's getting sad the way that we have to make sure we are more and more politically correct these days, it's stupid! In some cases fair enough, it's important to be politically correct as not to offend but alot of the time it's not really that offensive and is just in good humour.

Why does everything seem to be heading towards being PC? There are so many things that you could have said before that were just in the spirit of fun and it would be fine but say the same things now and people will glare at you. I suppose it's kind of linked to today's lawsuit crazed society in which you've only got to so much as glance at somebody and thats enough to bring a law suit against them for one reason or another.

Society really needs to lighten up a bit!

: 10 Nov 2004 00:33 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem