The UK Government’s Civil Partnership law has been thrown into confusion by a case heard today in the Court of Appeal.
Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld brought a case demanding the right to enter into a Civil Partnership. Currently, under the Civil Partnership Act, only homosexuals can apply. Or to be more specific, unrelated persons of the same sex.
Civil Partnership Act
Civil Partners are granted all the rights of marriage. They are free of inheritance tax on property which passes from one to the other on the death of a party to the ‘partnership’. They are also excused from being compelled to testify against each other. In general, neither can be compelled to give evidence against the other. That exemption could be crucial in a sexual abuse case involving a third party, for example.
The Act was meant to convey all the benefits of marriage. At the time it was passed, the Government of the day, under Tony Blair, gave a number of undertakings. Among them was an assurance that marriage for homosexual couples was out of the question. Heterosexuals had marriage, homosexuals had civil partnership, they said.
However, one parliament cannot bind a successor. David Cameron’s Conservatives legislated for ‘gay marriage’ in 2012. And of course all Tony Blair’s promises counted for nothing. Nor did the Tories do away with civil partnerships in the process. So homosexuals now have two options for state recognition of their relationship and heterosexuals just one. That is what Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld argued was unfair. And the judges agreed it breaches their right to a family life.
Government considering their options
Nevertheless, the couple did not secure a ruling that the situation was unlawful. The Government are considering their options at the moment. They are looking into the whole situation of civil partnerships in the light of gay marriage. That saved them.
But as Rebecca Steinfeld said after the hearing, the matter cannot stand as it is. There is an inequality. So what should we pray the Government do?
They can hardly repeal the Civil Partnership Act. Numerous homosexual couples took advantage of it. Most believied it was all they were going to get. Some have ‘converted’ their partnerships into ‘gay marriage’. But others reject the symbolism of marriage. Perhaps they are more astute.
But that leaves heterosexual couples who perhaps don’t care for the ‘patriarchy’ of marriage out on a limb. if Parliament extends civil partnerships to them, the Government will lose millions in inheritance tax. And what about spinster sisters living together? Should they include them as well?
What should we pray for?
We are like the travellers trying to reach a West Country town from deep in the Devon lanes. They asked a local man what route they should take. ‘Well’, he said, ‘If I was you, I wouldn’t be a-starting from ‘ere’.
Our Government instituted wickedness with the Civil Partnership Act. They made matters worse with the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. Anything they do now will devalue marriage further. So what can we pray for except wholesale repentance? Leave your comment below, please!
Mark 10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. 7 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; 8 And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. (KJV)
This one will be a difficult situation to address correctly, but the righteous way ahead is to unwind the same sex ‘marriage’ act and the civil partnerships act, putting marriage back where God ordained it to be.
HMG cannot devalue marriage (the divine is beyond it), but it can further devalue the concept, marriage, and therefore the perception of citizens who otherwise might enter into marriage as a lifelong, heterosexual, exclusive person to person, covenant. Since at least Tony Blair, homosexuals have been getting a bad deal by government preaching that homosexualism is to be celebrated, rather than grieved over as, like paedophilia & fornication, a form of fallen sexuality. It is not a birth thing; it is not a race thing; it can have good properties. Homosexuals, as human beings, share in God’s Image, but that truth and that love is being too often withheld from them in favour of encouraging homosexuality. The celebratory idea has extended to persecuting those who refuse to join the celebration, and thus so-called Equality has become a tyrannical god promoting job- & ownership-breaking inequality. With David Cameron, HMG has moved into Animalisation, treating human beings as mere animals, desacralising thinking, rather than treating those in God’s image and therefore under objective morality, with the respect they deserve(d) as accountable beings. Marriage has governmentally become conceptualised as not God ordained, thus not as God alone defined, but as a societal construct of convenience, capable of societal redefinition whenever convenient: contractual, not covenantal. Humanity is being excluded. Objectively, the concept ssm cannot exist, unless objectively God has constructed it so.
HMG needs, for the sake of the people, to repent first its arrogance of thinking it could redefine what God has defined. Such was sin, not doing God, and was the greatest shame of David Cameron’s reign. HMG is permitted to offer a nonmarital status, as Tony Blair’s Civil Partnership did, even though arguably heterosexual carers and family members should be equally entitled to similar status: perhaps it is time to revamp the name & sense of CPs. Thus, IMO HMG should apologising for its error in conceiving marriage as not divinely instituted, as nonsacred, remove the legal category ‘ssm’ in deference to objective truth (that such couple are not married in fact, only in legal fiction), and revert to Civil Partnership (perhaps itself rebranded & fairer) status, enlarging that status to any two adults who have lived together (regardless of sexuality) for a minimum of perhaps 12 years. Such personal commitments may be honoured by certain financial perks irrespective of whether any sexual union is involved. God save the people.
In France, a civil partnership called PACS was introduced in 1999. entirely with homosexuals in mind.
Nevertheless, there is no such discrimination in French law as here, and it went without saying that any two adults could have one.
To the great surprise of the authorities, it was incredibly popular with young heterosexuals. They were all asking each other in French “Shall we get married, or shall we get paxed ?”
By 2012, 94% of paxed couples were ordinary opposite-sex couples.
I really don’t see why the Government should hold out against it. If it offers the same advantages as marriage, what’s the difference ? (Christians might not approved of the very common registry office marriage either).
Peter Tatchell suggests that neither sex nor romantic love should privilege themselves above other close relationships which come in all shapes and sizes, can be of any gender, any number , last any duration and perhaps be of any species .
http://www.petertatchell.net/lgbt_rights/partnerships/insignificantother.htm
On the other two New Zealand straight men have availed themselves of the privileges and perks of same sex marriage, which appear to have all of the privileges of straight marriage and none of their disadvantages, for instance in same sex marriage there is no conception of adultery or the need to be faithful.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/09/12/straight_men_marrying_in_new_zealand_straight_couples_have_been_mocking.html
So maybe as has been mentioned, two elderly spinsters who fear having to pay inheritance tax on the death of one of one of them, should forget the civil partnership and simply enter a same sex marriage and have all the goodies.
So maybe as
I believe that the French PAX is open to almost any two people who run their household together for any reason, including (for example) niece looking after elderly uncle.
I understand that in law the only difference between civil partnership and marriage is that in civil partnership, adultery is not grounds for ‘divorce’. The presumption might therefore reasonably be drawn that the heterosexual litigants act to extend partnership in order not to commit to exclusivity in sexual relations. Is such sexual laxity something the state should encourage, even from a secular point of view? No, of course not. The legal relationship created by marriage is designed to protect, inter alia, resultant children: to extend civil partnership to heterosexual relationships without imposing exclusivity would be to undermine the rights of children to be brought up in a committed parental relationship.
True marriage, Holy Matrimony, a covenant in the sight of God undertaken by a man and a woman, both reborn by water and the Spirit, is another matter entirely: a sacrament. Man’s law is not God’s law. No worldly attempt to redefine words, to legally recognise a state of sodomy, or other abhorrent and sacrilegous sexual congress can sully true marriage. Christians are in the world, but should not be of it. And the same goes for marriage.
Any comments welcome…
But with respect, that’s nonsense.
If they were trying to legalise civil partnership to avoid one of them being able to divorce the other on the grounds of adultery ,they would just agree not to do that. It’s much easier to divorce on the grounds that the marriage has irretrievably broken down.anyway. That is the basis of all modern divorces. Adultery is only one possible way of demonstrating it. The days of professional co-respondents in Brighton have long gone. When did Epistle last here of such a case ?
This is quite amusing stuff ! I don’t believe that any state or church has ever successfully “imposed exclusivity”.
I’m sorry, but really !