...in the interests of stirring it a bit

Hey, swivel eyed loons! Gay marriage tourism actually exists. So they'll be coming over here, etc etc

And if it were to exist in Britain it would of course be all to the good: showpieces the superiority of democratic institutions, helps activists in China with their own gay rights campaign and brings money into the country. All kinds of win, there.

Not that it matters much to me but I’m vaguely hoping to get the jackpot in today’s vote: heterosexual civil partnerships and gay marriage. I can’t understand exactly why the people who say they want to protect marriage from gay participation, which would strengthen it, wish to do so by equalizing civil partnership rights, which would tend to weaken it. Nor do I understand why the government consider this a wrecking amendment, since they’d have the votes, with Labour, to get the whole thing through. Maybe the whole thing is a way for the SELs promoting this amendment to give face to the government while getting what they want, ie the whole bill abandoned.

Comments

[Phil]

If you listen closely you can hear the civil servant who drafted the civil partnership legislation quietly moaning to him- or herself, "It's the same thing! It's designed to be the same thing!"

Unfortunately nobody hears.

[dsquared]

Oddly, the only difference appears to be that civil partnership is slightly more difficult to get out of than marriage - you can get a divorce as of right in cases of infidelity, but to get a CP dissolved, infidelity only counts in so far as it contributes to making a case of irretrievable breakdown.

[nick s]

That's curious. It reminds me of how some of the SELs in the US are also advocates of "covenant marriage", which is deliberately designed to make divorce harder. For them, it's not just the gays destroying the sanctity of marriage by wanting to get married. The straights are even worse: enough to require a two-tier marriage system, where they get to feel special.

[Phil]

I think it's a "what do they actually do?" thing - you can't say that your partner-in-civil-partnership has Done It with someone else if there isn't a singular It that all PICPs Do. As we saw when Scruton was flannelling about traditional marriage having an inherent tendency towards procreation, the trouble with these people is that (like St Paul) they're obsessed with shagging.