Blessing Civil Partnerships in Church

February 23, 2010

Excerpt:
To begin with there is the issue as to whether allowing Civil Partnerships in churches would change the nature of that institution. When the Government introduced Civil Partnerships it assured faith communities that these were not “gay marriages” but rather an altogether different type of union. The authors of the letter however base their arguments on the similarities of the nature of the vows in Civil Partnerships and marriage, which means that they are working from the basis that the two are just different forms of the same institution. The only way that the argument that “Straight couples have the choice between civil marriage and religious marriage. Gay couples are denied a similar choice” works is if Civil Partnership and civil marriage are analogous. If Civil Partnership is a different institution to civil marriage then one cannot apply a justice argument on the basis that one would expect to do exactly the same thing when registering both of them. the rest