We’re all here to get married right?
Whether you be gay or straight you want to be married. Well if the statistics are true, there were 88,000 more gay men and women who entered into a civil partnership since 2005. (The government predicted 22,000 and there were more than 100,000!)
Equality is very important to me. Well it should be important to everyone. Why should a gay man have different legal obstacles to a straight man.
Indeed this picture (which I assume I stole from Buzzfeed) highlights what I think beautifully.
Yet whilst I bang on about equality perhaps I forget what it actually means to be married. I know I have guffawed at the concept of becoming a civil partner in the past. Indeed I would still say I am not a cowboy, Bean is not my partner.
So what I really want to talk about today and in the future is the term marriage.
What I hadn’t really taken on board was how religious the term marriage was. Perhaps I hadn’t appreciated how religious marriage really is?
The other day I was chatting to someone at an event and she happened to mention she had just got “married”* to her girlfriend and the pervading thought within her peer group is that marriage is word that should be taken as a choice. Indeed why should a community fight for the right to be “married” when they are shunned by the “Church.” Why would anyone want to be part of an archaic system?
I’m not religious, I was married in a civil ceremony and it is something that struck a chord with me. Is the word marriage so deeply entrenched in ancient mysticism? I certainly don’t want to be part of a civil partnership, it’s just such a cold and and clinical phrase. Though I do enjoy being called a wife.
Is there a happy medium or another choice?
*Yes or no to the quotation marks? I would usually say no. But now? Hmm.
Thank you for asking this question in a way that makes me examine my own beliefs more carefully. I guess on one hand marriage should be available to anyone, irrespective of sex and religion now we come to mention it (I was staggered to learn that people aren’t able to legally marry within their places of worship unless that place of worship happens to be a church) but on the other hand, I know some gay people don’t want to be ‘married’.
As well as same sex couples being unable to marry, opposite sex couples are unable to enter into a civil partnership. A while ago I heard about two couples, one gay and one hetrosexual, trying to challenge this through the Courts on a human right’s basis – I’m not sure where they got with it.
Anyway, yes, as someone who is just about to be married I do wonder about the religious connotations of the whole thing. I guess I could call Pete my ‘life partner’ but I suspect I’d vomit every time I did… he.
This is really interesting. I hadn’t really thought about how religious the word ‘marriage’ is – i’m not religious at all but I still want to be ‘married’ and to be ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ not ‘partners’! It’s not a partnership, that just sounds so business like and unromantic. Marriage should be available to everyone!
As long as government offers “marriage” to people of either gender, marriage isn’t a religious term. It is an emotional and perhaps spiritual one but even more so it is a legal term. Creating civil partnerships to shield marriage as a religious institution form equality is something the state should not be involved in.
As an extension of that idea, however, I am an atheist. I wish to be married to my partner as his wife and not his civil partner for many reasons. The first is that even though I am not religious, I like the idea of being connected to all of those who have married their loves before me (although I am totally aware that marrying for love has a relatively short history). The second is that is *is* a spiritual thing for me. I’m not pledging to run a business together, I’m pledging to him that our lives will be intertwined. That is wife not partner, no?