More on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

The issue of allowing same sex couples the right to marry has featured on this blog a number of times - first in March 2012 when I first argued in favour of this change; then in June 2012 when I took issue with three of the main arguments used against the change; and most recently in February 2013 when I sympathised with the difficult position that the Prime Minister had found himself in, attacked over this proposal from left and right alike. But here we are again.

Last Friday, after a fairly short but rocky road, the French equivalent law allowing same sex couples to marry was signed by President Hollande. Here on this side of the Channel, things are less straightforward. Apparently Tim Loughton MP (Con, East Worthing and Shoreham; formerly Children's Minister before he was sacked last autumn) is introducing an amendment to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill today. The amendment will say that, at the same time that marriage is opened up to same sex couples, civil partnership will be opened to heterosexual couples.

Now obviously proposed amendments to Bills do not necessarily end up being adopted, but this one is said to have the backing of 150 Conservative MPs (the Tory Party has a free vote on this Bill) and, at least possibly, the support of the Labour front bench. Superficially, it might sound like a good idea, but I can't begin to explain the many ways in which this makes me despair. Here's two for starters.

First, and most importantly, this is a wrecking amendment. Loughton is on record as being opposed to equal marriage rights for same sex couples, and this wrecking motion works in two different ways. One is that it makes it less likely that the Bill will be passed into law at all. In this instance, the way in which that is calculated to happen is that those favouring the amendment hope that, with it there, the government will pull the plug on the entire Bill. I'm not sure how likely that is on this occasion, given how committed David Cameron seems to be to the body of the Bill itself, but it's possible.

The other way that the wrecking motion works is that it delays the implementation of the Bill by making it more complicated. I'm not sure how effective this approach is on this occasion either, but it seems to have the government running scared, which says something about its potential. The alleged cost of the amendment is hard to assess objectively, because allowing straight couples to enter civil partnerships doesn't actually add any significant 'cost' unless these are straight couples who wouldn't have married.

There are some such people, of course, because they object to marriage for personal reasons (usually related to either its perceived religious status - which civil marriage doesn't have - or its patriarchal history which the law has long since resolved). But those people are making a personal choice, not having one imposed on them by law. The eligibility criteria for civil partnership are identical to those for marriage. (At the moment they aren't of course - the requirements as to the sex of the people involved are different - but those differences will be removed by this Bill.) So while some people who can marry but choose not to do so may later choose to enter civil partnership, they haven't really gained anything that they didn't have before. The legal consequences of marriage and of civil partnership are identical in all material ways.

That brings me to my second reason for sighing at Loughton's amendment. Civil Partnership was introduced in 2003-04 because the government of the day was led to think that it would be unable to get a same-sex marriage Bill through the House of Lords. Now, whether they were right about that or not, the compromise that they found was to enshrine all the same rights and duties in a status which had a different label. In legal terms, civil partnership is marriage - only the name is different (other than one or two inconsequential details).

It has always baffled me why a heterosexual couple would want a civil partnership, since to me is represents a blatantly discriminatory, lesser status while carrying all the same rights and duties. That lesser status is apparent in international law, for example. Any marriage performed in this country will be recognised as such around the world. A civil partnership, on the other hand, will only be recognised as carrying legal rights in a few places.

The proposal to allow straight couples to enter civil partnerships is absolutely not comparable with the French position of having marriage on the one hand and the PACS on the other - PACS comes with very significantly lesser rights and duties than marriage, and is consequently open to many more people than marriage. (Siblings, for example, can enter a PACS, but would not be able to marry.)

So if this amendment is passed, and if we end up with a situation where any couple, whether straight or gay, can enter either a marriage or a civil partnership, the law will have reached the farcical position whereby a stop-gap measure introduced to grant legal rights to same-sex couples in the face of social opposition will have been extended to create two virtually identical statuses which all couples can pick between.

Ironically, this amendment is being pursued not only by those who are opposed to equal rights for same-sex couples, but by those who are most enamoured with the arguments about protecting 'traditional marriage'. I think it is quite reasonable for Cameron to position his approach as supporting marriage - by extending marriage to same-sex couples, more people can marry and enter this special union. Those who support the amendment, on the other hand, are favouring extending to opposite-sex couples all the legal rights and duties of marriage, but outside marriage. How this fits with their pro-marriage agenda is beyond me.

Book Review: "Gaydar Culture - Gay Men,Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age", by Sharif Mowlabocus

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Deconstructing the Marriage Debate

Some people claim that gay couples should not be allowed to marry because it will be bad for children, have adverse consequences for other people, and because it is in any case unnecessary since civil partnership gives the same legal rights as marriage. This post explains why those arguments do not stand up to scrutiny. Marriage is a good thing, and it is sad that those who claim to be 'for marriage' are trying to argue against letting all committed couples marry if they wish to do so.



I attended a panel discussion on allowing same-sex couples to marry, hosted by the British Academy in London, earlier this week. On the panel were

 - the Rev Dr Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul's and now a parish priest in London
- Professor Leslie Green, Professor of the Philosophy of Law at the University of Oxford
 - journalist Melanie McDonagh, currently a Leader Writer for the London Evening Standard; I cannot find a useful summary page, but a google search gets you lots of her published articles.

The panelists were, of course, aiming to give a different perspective on the issues raised, and a vigorous debate followed their talks. I'm not going to engage with all the points discussed there, but some of the claims made by Ms McDonagh reminded me of things said by the Coalition for Marriage (C4M), and I find these claims impossible to let pass.

The claim that marriage is good for children:

One of Ms McDonagh's points, and which one also finds under the heading 'Marriage is Unique' on the C4M homepage, is that children do best when they are raised by a mother and a father who are married to one another. As C4M puts it, 'the evidence shows that children do best with a married mother and a father'. Well, there is indeed a good deal of evidence that this claim, in itself, is true.

The problem is that those who are trying to make any further claims about what this evidence means are confusing correlation with causation. Children's well-being and marriage are positively correlated - in general, children of married parents do better on most standard measures than children whose parents are separated, children with only one parent for whatever reason (death of a parent or an absent parent), and children whose parents live together but are not married. However, that correlation says nothing about causation - the question of whether marriage causes this greater well-being is not answered by observing the correlation.

So what do we know about the causation? In 2010-11, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (hardly a radical organisation) published a number of papers based on their study of marriage and unmarried cohabitation. What their research found was that people who marry tend to have more of the characteristics that contribute to greater child well-being and relationship stability than those who have children outside of marriage. Research economist Dr Ellen Greaves is quoted on the IFS press release as saying this:

"It is true that children born to married couples are on average more cognitively and emotionally successful than children born to [unmarried] cohabiting couples. But careful analysis shows that this largely reflects the differences between the types of people who decide to get married and those who don’t. On average those who marry tend to come from more advantaged families, and are more cognitively and emotionally successful themselves, than those who cohabit. This explains the differences in outcomes for children. Marriage itself appears to confer little, if any, benefit in terms of child development."

So yes, it's true that children whose parents are married tend, on average, to do better than those whose parents are not married. But the children who do less well would not be helped by the mere fact of their parents marrying. (The main effect of such a shift would be on the statistics: the average well-being for children of married parents would come down, as less well-resourced (in a broad sense) parents entered the 'married' category.) The best thing that we could do to promote children's well-being is to help the unmarried parents to acquire more of the things that married parents already have - education, material resources, and other things to help with emotional and cognitive success in the adults.

I cited the IFS findings in a question to Ms McDonagh, and she responded by saying that "those findings have been disputed". The work that Ms McDonagh referred to, responding to the IFS study, comes from the Centre for Social Justice, but it makes for less than compelling reading. It combines bald assertions ("There is good evidence that the effects of marriage are really the effects of prior commitment which leads to marriage") with a flawed attempt to challenge the methodology of the IFS study.

For example, in assessing marriage versus unmarried cohabitation, the IFS study has 'controlled for' the likelihood of pregnancy being unplanned and for the quality of the parents' relationship when the child is 9 months old. The CSJ characterises this as the IFS "stripping out very important things". The CSJ's point seems to be that unplanned pregnancies are bad for relationships (which may be true; I don't know, and the CSJ gives no evidence in support of the claim) - they say this:

"unplanned pregnancies tend to make people feel trapped and result in more fragile partnerships in the longer term. If people have not made a conscious, deliberate decision to commit, they are more prone to split up when things get difficult."

But this point, true or not, is a distraction and is no answer to the IFS study. When a factor is 'controlled for' by researchers, that means that you take into account its effects - in other words, you are asking: what is the effect of relationship type, once you take into account whether the pregnancy was planned or not? Both married and unmarried couples have both planned and unplanned pregnancies; the IFS study is asking whether the parents' relationship type affects relationship stability and child well-being regardless of whether the pregnancy was planned or unplanned.

Leaving all this aside, though, I still struggle to understand how the 'marriage is good for children' argument can be deployed as a reason to prevent same-sex couples from marrying. For those who think that marriage in itself brings benefits, would it not be sensible to encourage as many couples as possible to enter into marriage? While this may come as a shock, same-sex couples often have children (especially lesbian couples). And, what's more, they do not require medical assistance to achieve that, as Ms McDonagh implied at the talk. Lesbians are perfectly capable of having children with the help of a willing male friend; and, indeed, gay men are perfectly capable of having children with the help of a willing female friend (though I grant you that the input of that female friend is rather more onerous than the input of the male friend of a lesbian parent).

So same-sex couples are parents, and have been being parents for a long time. (Single homosexual people have been doing this too.) The law provides various mechanisms to help same-sex couples to be recognised as parents, whether through adoption, assisted reproduction, surrogacy arrangements or obtaining parental responsibility for a child once the child is born. Same-sex parenting is both allowed and actively facilitated by our law, and so it seems strange for those who think that marriage is important for children to say that the institution should be specifically closed off to same-sex parents. After all, the children involved bear no responsibility for who their parents are, and if marriage is about promoting children then surely all parents should be encouraged to marry, regardless of their sex.

The claim that same-sex marriage will have 'profound consequences':

The next claim that I want to consider is the supposed broader consequences of allowing same-sex couples to marry. On this point, I find the sheer scale of the scaremongering on the C4M website rather astonishing. Under the heading 'Profound consequences', it says this:

"If marriage is redefined, those who believe in traditional marriage will be sidelined. People's careers could be harmed, couples seeking to adopt or foster could be excluded, and schools would inevitably have to teach the new definition to children. If marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?"

It is hard to know where to start with this passage. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I am simply unable to see how anyone will be 'sidelined' by the fact that same-sex couples are allowed to marry. My first question is: from what will they be sidelined? And what will it mean to be sidelined? I may be wrong, but I would have thought that most people's interest in marriage starts and stops with their own marriage (if they are married or plan to marry) and with those of people close to them. What possible difference does it make to me whether two strangers are or are not married?

And then, 'people's careers could be harmed'. I suppose this is a reference to possible further cases like Ladele v Islington LBC. Ms Ladele was a marriage registrar who opposed civil partnerships on religious grounds (though perhaps ironically, given the current debate, her real objection was to gay marriage, which she equated with civil partnership). Put simply, Ms Ladele eventually resigned from her job because she felt unable to perform civil partnership ceremonies as her employer was demanding, and then sued for constructive dismissal. The Court of Appeal dismissed her claim, essentially on the basis that "the legislature has decided that the requirements of a modern liberal democracy, such as the United Kingdom, include outlawing discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on grounds of sexual orientation" (para 73).

While some may have sympathy with Ms Ladele, I simply cannot see that a person's views, religious or otherwise, should enable them to pick and choose which parts of their job they will do, particularly when that job is to perform a function of the state (being a marriage registrar). Suppose that a person were against inter-racial marriage - we would surely not countenance permitting them to refuse to perform such ceremonies and still keep their job. (Inter-racial marriage was illegal in many US States until Loving v Virginia in 1967. No doubt many people in those States objected to the change in the law which the US Supreme Court forced upon them, but the decision was still plainly right.)

Then there is the question of (presumably heterosexual) couples be excluded from adoption or fostering. Again, I struggle to understand this point. The rules on adoption and fostering are already de-coupled from heterosexuality and from marriage - a person or a couple can apply to foster or adopt regardless of these factors - so how will permitting same-sex couples the status of marriage affect that? I am told that there are examples of people being stopped from fostering or adopting because they oppose homosexuality; but whatever one thinks of those cases (if they exist), it is difficult to see that the marriage question actually makes much difference.

Next, schools will have to teach children that both heterosexual and homosexual people can marry. Well yes, okay, I'll semi-concede this one. It is true, I suppose, that if schools 'teach' about marriage they will need to point out that marriage is not sex-specific. (I may be deficient for not having gone to a religious school, but I cannot recall being taught about marriage in any significant detail when I was at school. I understand that the importance of relationships, including marriage and other stable relationships, is now included in the Personal, Social and Health Education syllabus, but I am not clear that this involves much detailed discussion about marriage per se.)

And then the polygamy argument. Without getting into the point that some cultures happily allow polygamous marriage (and indeed the law in this country will give legal recognition to a polygamous marriage performed in another country if the spouses move to the UK), this claim is a real red herring. It is really no different from the claim that allowing same-sex couples to marry would then, of necessity, require the state to recognise my marriage to a tree. Personally, I'm not sure that I see quite why we should not allow polygamous marriage, but that is beside the point. The 'thin end of the wedge' argument only works if the further examples are materially identical to the original claim, and multi-party relationships are, in some significant ways, different from two-person partnerships. Committed heterosexual couples and committed homosexual couples, on the other hand, have no material differences; that is one reason why discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation is prohibited by the Equality Act 2010, and the law has recognised that for a good many years now.

The claim that gay couples don't 'need' marriage because of civil partnership:

I'm going to deal with this one fairly quickly, because I discussed it on my blog a couple of months ago. The C4M website points out (correctly) that civil partnership offers the same legal rights as marriage, and then says (incorrectly) that this means that there is no need to 'redefine marriage' (as it describes the proposals). And then:

"It's not discriminatory to support traditional marriage. Same-sex couples may choose to have a civil partnership but no one has the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us."

Well, it is discriminatory to support traditional marriage if that means restricting it to heterosexual couples, just as it was discriminatory for some US States to bar inter-racial couples from marrying before 1967. Discrimination itself means only observing (and acting upon) a difference between two cases, but discrimination is prima facie wrongful when it is illegitimate to use that difference as a basis for the distinction. Our law identifies certain differences which are thought illegitimate (described in s 4 of the Equality Act 2010 as the 'protected characteristics'), including sex, race and sexual orientation. So the position that C4M advocates is undeniably discriminatory. In principle, that discrimination could be justified (and therefore be legitimate), but, for reasons discussed here and on my previous post, it is not, in fact, justified. (Put shortly, the discrimination is not a legitimate way of pursuing a legitimate aim - see, by analogy, the reasoning in Ghaidan v Godin-Mendoza.)

As for the second sentence, I'm back to this point: what difference does it make to one couple's marriage that another couple is also married? The effect of opening up marriage to same-sex couples is liberal and facilitative: it enables two people to choose to marry one another, but it does not compel anyone to do anything; and, at the same time, there are no consequences of this decision for anyone else's relationships (or, at least, no consequences not already arising from civil partnerships). Heterosexual couples are totally unaffected by whether homosexual couples marry or not. The claim that marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples, on the other hand, is an attempt to impose one group's view on the way that other people can live their lives. I find more than a little irony in the fact that C4M is trying to lay claim to the "other people shouldn't impose their views on us" argument.

Debating the issues:

Finally, I want to say a brief word about a slightly odd remark on the 'about us' page of the C4M website. The authors call for a civilised debate (which I certainly agree with), and then say that they "will highlight any intimidation or intolerance shown to supporters of traditional marriage". I'm not sure what this means. I hope that the authors are simply trying to avoid unpleasantness, but the comment might be taken to imply that those of us who disagree with their views might find ourselves accused of intimidation or intolerance (again, some irony there perhaps). There was a little hint of this in some heckling from the audience at the British Academy talk, implying that disagreeing with the views of, in that instance, Ms McDonagh was, in itself, a form of intimidation. I would certainly be pleased to know that those who oppose opening marriage to same-sex couples consider this post to fall well outside intimidation or intolerance, even though I take issue with more or less everything that they say.

The loneliness of the long-distance homosexual

Being gay can be pretty lonely - but as a group of people, we gay men are not making it any easier on ourselves. This post is about the often-draining lived experience of the single gay man's interactions with the online gay community. While the post is suitable for all, it does discuss the shenanigans of gay men, so don't read if you don't care to know too much about it....


I don't know whether Dawson's Creek was ever thought a particularly profound programme. For those who don't know, it was a television series about teenagers growing up in a small town in New England. I didn't watch it when I was younger, but I picked up the box set in a sale a few years ago, and there's a line in it that's stuck with ever since. One of the characters, Jack McPhee (played by the beautiful Kerr Smith, pictured), comes out as being gay some months after joining the show in the second season, having initially had a short romance with the female lead. Asked why he hadn't told her before, Jack says that he hadn't wanted to accept that he was gay:

"I guess the thought of being gay just seemed like such a lonely thought."

I remember the first time I heard him say that, my heart just stopped. That single sentence hit me in a place that I hadn't even realised existed, and summed up so many of my own worries about being gay. But what is it that makes being gay a lonely idea? After all, plenty of people, gay straight and other, are lonely at times; but somehow the very idea of being gay can carry a connotation of loneliness.

Is is a prejudiced societal expectation that homosexuality goes with promiscuity (especially for gay men) and therefore runs contrary to a stable, committed relationship? Is it the (again) prejudiced societal expectation that being homosexual implies that a person will not raise children (again, especially for gay men)? Is it the (potentially hidden) 'otherness' of being gay compared with the expectation of heterosexuality? Or some combination of these? Or something else entirely?

I'm very aware in writing about this that there is a huge body of academic literature that already exists, and that I'm really fairly ignorant of most of it. But this isn't an academic analysis - it's just some personal musings.

Why am I thinking about this? There's a number of reasons, some of which are too personal to share with the blog, but some of them I'll offer up. One is an awareness of how long it's been since I went on a date (last July, since you ask). Another is the connected awareness of how hard I've always found it to meet other gay men for dates without running into the highly promiscuous side of gay life that, while something of a stereotype, is nonetheless very real. And a third is the odd world of online gay dating that I occasionally venture into, and that's what I thought I'd say a few words about.

Welcome to the world of gay men

The world that I'm about to describe will be alien to most heterosexuals, but all too familiar to most gay men. (I don't know whether lesbians have similar experiences, so I don't claim to comment on that.). So let me take you to www.gaydar.co.uk, self-styled with this on its home page:

"The premier gay dating site. Home to millions of men. Free to cruise, chat and search. With over 6 million members from over 140 countries you're never far from what you want, when you want it."

So it's a dating website? Well, sort of. Some people do indeed use it for dating, especially if you want to use that term in a broad sense (drinks followed by sex, perhaps), but it's main function is better described in the third sentence of its self-description - it's about chatting (sometimes), searching (often) and cruising (a lot). People set up profiles, though often with little or nothing on them, and then they search through other people's profiles, usually focused on those who are online at the same time. You can search by town, region, profile name, and so on. There's an email function, and a chat service where rooms are arranged by location or theme.

Anyway, that's all fine. I'm not here passing judgement on people who want to find sexual partners online - whatever floats your boat really. The thing that interests me about this is more subtle, and it's the strange interpersonal interactions that you find on the site itself, separate from any actual meetings that might take place. This is just my experience, but having spoken to a number of gay friends it seems to be fairly common. (Compare my post on anecdotes!)

So here's what happens. You send a message to someone whose profile makes you think, for whatever reason, that you'd like to know them more. And you get no reply. (Obviously there are exceptions.) You go in the chat room, and you invite someone there to chat with you and, after a moment or two, they decline the offer (or they ignore you - I can never work out which is more annoying).

If you do manage to get into a chat with someone, there are a few standard scenarios. One is that the first thing they say is something like "Hey mate, where are you?" - subtext: how long will it take me to meet up with you, and therefore will you be convenient for sex? Another is that, after a very minimal amount of small talk, you get asked "are you looking to meet?", "what are you into [sexually]?" or, more subtly, "what are you looking for?" Any answer not relating to sex usually ends the conversation.

A third option is that you get asked, in fairly short order, if you have some, or some more, pictures of yourself. If you don't, that often ends the conversation; and if you do, and you send them, then the conversation also often ends abruptly when the other person receives them. (Judging from my straw poll of friends, this seems to happen regardless of whether you are good-looking, sexy, average, ugly, blonde, brunette, red-head or what - so I think it's not wholly a judgement about my attractiveness.)

Finally, and most rarely, you find someone capable of, and interested in, having an actual conversation. These people are sometimes also looking for sex, but hey, at least they've developed a slightly more sociable way of going about it. These are the only people that I'm not talking about here, but they're sadly few and far between.

For people more technologically up-to-date than me, there's also the express version of this experience - grindr:

"Find local gay, bi and curious guys for dating or friends for free on Grindr. Meet the men nearest you with GPS, location-based Grindr."

This is a smart-phone app which performs much the same function as gaydar, but with less pretence that there is any aim other than cruising. (Its claims of "dating or friends" bear precisely no resemblance to the experience of anyone I know who has used this app - it's about sex, and it's fairly up-front about that.) According to my friends, the same thing happens here - offers to chat are routinely ignored, and the whole experience sounds like a meat market based primarily on your attractiveness, your body shape, what you like doing sexually and the size of your cock. (No shying away from the truth here.) Oh, and proximity. This is GPS-controlled, remember, so guys appear on the screen in the order of their physical proximity to you - all the most convenient for a quickie.

A friend of mine tried to set up a group on grindr for non-promiscuous gay men who were interested in making friends and finding relationships, rather than sex. He got a lot of abuse and piss-take, but no actual support for this idea. Maybe it was a pipe dream and he was playing to the wrong crowd, but that leaves me with the question: where is the right crowd?

Why does this matter?

The problem with this experience is that it is unbelievably draining, undermining your self-confidence and sapping hope. I've deleted my gaydar profile a number of times when my ego just can't take the constant beating any longer, and I'm currently quite glad that I don't have a smart phone so that the additional masochism of grindr isn't an option.

The gay community, so called, in its online format can be a bitchy and hateful environment, characterised by an unsupportive and casual disregard for anyone else's feelings or experiences. There are many possible aspects to the loneliness of the gay lived experience, but one thing that's been making a mark on me is just how much we don't help ourselves. Gaydar, grindr and other similar things seem to me increasingly to be more destructive of gay men's self-images and of positive life experiences than they are creative of meaningful opportunities. But of course, it's not the sites themselves that do this - it's us, the users.

The thought of being gay was, and is, a lonely thought for many of us. The sad thing is that at least some of that loneliness seems to be self-inflicted. We need to find an alternative, affirming way of meeting, dating, living and loving.