Under the current law on civil partnerships they are a purely civil and secular affair taking place primarily in register offices or under licence in other non-religious venues like civil marriages.
The changes being announced this week are a result of an amendment introduced to the Equality Act by Labour’s, Lord Alli, and passed in March last year. The amendment was responding to requests from some religious organisations such as the Quakers, Unitarians and Liberal Jewish synagogues who wanted to be able to offer civil partnership ceremonies.
While there was much fanfare from Theresa May and the equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, about this step forward it was interesting that the statements from the Home Office didn’t mention Lord Alli or the Equality Act or that it has taken them the best part of year to start making progress on this. Lynne Featherstone told the TUC LGBT conference last July that she would be looking at how ‘they could take this issue forward’ and despite the announcement last week there is still no timetable for when the Alli Amendment will come into effect.
Given the very slow progress by the government over the Alli Amendment which had already been passed by parliament before the coalition came to office, you can be forgiven for feeling sceptical about their commitment to their other announcement last week, that of progress on marriage equality.
The issue of extending civil marriage to same sex couples has been growing in importance over the last year with polling showing overwhelming desire for full gay marriage by the LGBT community and the debate over gay marriage has progressed much faster and further than anyone would have predicted back in 2005.
The promise of extending civil marriage to gay and lesbian couples had been trailed the previous weekend by the government. By the time we got to Wednesday it had been watered down to a consultation on marriage equality and the final announcement on Thursday said that the government would be looking ‘at what steps could be taken’.
The commitment was vague enough for the Conservative LGBT group LGBTory to have expressed concern about the speed this is being taken at. and even the minister admitted during an interview with Gaydar Radio that they were being slow on the issue. She went on to say that ‘baby steps’ were needed and that progress will take ‘as long as it takes’ and could make no guarantee that anything would be achieved before the next election.
Many people in the LGBT community will be wondering why we need to take ‘baby steps’ (if indeed anyone can work out what that means) and why a clear timetable and plan for consultation and implementation was not laid out. Cynics might suggest that this is actually being pushed into the long grass and that the government are trying to balance a desire to be seen as progressive but desperate to avoid the split in the coalition MPs vote that will almost certainly follow. While most Liberal Democrat MPs would support such a move (as would Labour MPs) the position with the Conservatives is much less clear with many more Tory MPs and peers remaining resolutely homophobic. The issue of marriage is certainly one of the touchstone issues that could lead to strong opposition from Tory MPs. The 2004 vote on civil partnerships saw 49 Tory MPs vote against and a further 62 not voting at all. The risk of opening divisions on the Tory benches on gay rights would certainly concern Cameron and his party manages who have been keen to try and detoxify the issue for their party.
What is clear is that there is still work to be done and the LGBT community are going to have to keep lobbying hard to get these commitments implemented. We are making progress and the work done under Labour on equality measures has had a significant impact on attitudes both politically and in the wider population, but whether we see any further progress before 2015 remains a very open question.