A sweet little video made by the Coalition for Marriage Equality in Britain, where the Conservative government is pressing ahead with plans to bring about civil marriage rights for gays this year:
For the record, the United Kingdom has allowed gays to serve openly in its military forces since 2000, as well as civil partnerships since 2005.
Here is Prime Minister David Cameron giving the keynote address at a Conservative Party conference last fall. Don't you wish our Republicans sounded like this?
Here's a link to the consultation - a request for comments from the public about the proposed law - currently open on the Home Office web site. Which makes me wonder - why doesn't our government do this?
Thursday, April 26, 2012
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5 comments:
I wholly support the CME's aims, but as an former serviceman I wish they'd use actors properly dressed and with a decent haircut! (that's todays rant) Pre 2000, you kept your head down, and hoped that no one would notice, and by and large, no one did, or at least they kept quiet if they did.
Its a difficult act for the Prime Minister to pull off, there is opposition from the Religious Divide, and from the old guard in his party, however, in general I think the country supports him on this at least.
Yeah there's one guy with really scruffy hair, and I was wondering can that be regulation haircut in HM Forces?
Still, it's a nice presentation, and a good thought. We'll see how far Cameron gets the ball down the field. Of course you know, the proposal is to allow only civil marriages, nothing in church, any church building.
Which I suppose is due to still having a State Church over there.
It is to get around the Church of England's opposition, and that of most other faiths, that he has gone for the Civil Ceremony approach. However, nowadays the majority of people no longer go to church regularly, or feel that the organised religions have much relevance to modern relationships, so the question of not having the ceremony in a church is not a ball breaker. Plus, of course, once it's there, people will soon get used to the idea, and then it may become available in religious buildings as well.
Well in essence our approach over here is for civil marriage also; religious groups may have within themselves a move towards equal marriage but that's a separate issue. And truly, as I've blogged about several times before, civil marriage is distinct from religious marriage.
Still, as an American, it's odd to read a law that *forbids* a marriage from being celebrated in a church building. Here, once you have the license in your hand, you can get married anywhere you like, on a rooftop, in a balloon, underwater, etc., etc.
From all I've read, it seems in the UK there are very strict limitations as to place - weddings and CP's must be done only in a short list of "approved venues." I wonder why does the gov't care at all where people get married?
I think any UK Govenment likes to remain in control. I don't know how the idea of relatively un-governed Las Vegas style drive-in marriage (and divorce)centres would go down back home!
At the end of the day I would rather the world's leaders and major religions had more important things on their minds instead of getting their knickers in a twist over LGBT weddings! Like it or not, its a minority issue, unlike poverty, terrorism, lack of education et al.
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