Last night, English and Welsh MPs voted in parliament in favour of the Equal Marriage Bill. 400 to 175. It’s great news for champions of equality and starts the somewhat arduous journey of bringing it into law. At its most basic, Equal Marriage would mean that same sex couples could get married, opposite sex couples could now enter into civil partnerships and churches and religious institutions that wish to marry same sex couples could. So a great big YEY for all 400 MPs that voted in favour, and in 10 years time when equality is the norm, I’m sure those 175 will feel very stupid.
As a quick aside….did you know that all 6 Muslim MPs voted in favour? That real progression and puts any Christian MPs argument to shame.
Here, Alice Arnold tells the Telegraph why she’s now going to marry Clare Balding.
If you have done a Civil Partnership as Clare Balding and I have, then what does yesterday’s victory mean? Well, we can ‘convert’ our partnership into ‘Marriage’. From using an expression that sounds like we have been paired up under an umbrella of politeness we can now use a phrase that is recognised by everyone.
Most of the people we know refer to us as ‘married’, they talk about having attended our ‘wedding’. We don’t though. We never have. I suspect other people use the term ‘married’ because the expression ‘Civilly Partnered’ sounds so ridiculous.But I suspect some use it (and they are nearly all straight) because that is simply what they feel we should be. Neither of us has made any secret of the fact that we would get married if the law allowed, every newspaper has reported it.
This is great news, but here in Australia, it’s a bitter pill to swallow. In 2012 our Parliament used same sex marriage as a political football, and put our marriage rights back an unknown number of years as they played out their game. The trouble is that we have no leadership on the issue – neither our Prime Minister nor Opposition Leader thinks their same sex attracted voters is worth a risk, like David Cameron or Barack Obama. There’s plenty of hopeful commentary out there, but it’s all denial, really. We won’t get same sex marriage in this country for many years to come thanks to our gutless pollies.
It’s unfortunate. I’ve been watching the developments in Australia over the last few years and I have to say I wholeheartedly agree with you. As someone that loves visiting and has often contemplated a move, I have to say that it’s Australia’s track record for equality that usually seals the deal and keeps me in the northern hemisphere. Hopefully one day someone will step up and commit to the issue fully.
Thanks for reading, and if you feel inspired to expand on this topic, we’re always keen to have guest bloggers.
Barry
Thanks Barry, I might just take you up on that!