Being civil about partnerships

Call me an old romantic, but I cried with joy at the news coverage of the first civil partnership celebrations just before Christmas. I never thought (though I very much hoped) that I’d see the day.

It took me back two decades, to my student days at the dawn of the AIDS era. The Communards sang ‘Our love is like forbidden fruit, but we take each bite with pride not shame…’, continuing with a trenchant commentary on the social backdrop of anti-gay prejudice and discrimination that the musicians were resisting: ‘…in this garden where the bitter poison rots’.

That bitter poison made a cameo reappearance in December in the form of a few Christian fundamentalists yelling ‘sodomite!’ at the two lesbian women who were first to register their partnership in Belfast. Nobody took much notice.

Society has come a long way in 20 years. But what of the church?

Back in the 80s, when it was assumed that AIDS was a ‘gay disease’, Christians and pastoral theologians woke up to the notion that gay relationships would benefit from the social recognition and support that heterosexuals are afforded.

Measures to enable same-sex relationships to be ‘permanent, faithful and stable’ were advocated. Ironically, now that just such a practical mechanism exists, Christians seem to have run for cover. Why?

I declare a particular interest, having lived out twice as many of my adult years in a same-sex relationship as I have in heterosexual ones. I write this, therefore, very much in a personal capacity, not an official one.  

I am now married, having previously not had that option. Unlike those who are more straightforwardly heterosexual, I know the difference that a public declaration makes to a loving relationship because I have something to compare it with (I know what it’s like to forge a relationship without it). It is, in short, both privilege and discipline. 

It’s not just ‘signing a bit of paper’. Neither is it just about ‘rights’ (to one’s partner’s pension; tenancy rights; exemption from inheritance tax; the right to be recognised as next of kin) – though these are crucially important.

Above all, it’s about asserting that personal relationships are not simply a private matter. Others have a stake in them. Society has a stake in them. When relationships go wrong, it’s not just the couple that suffers – the ripples go much wider, especially when there are children involved.

Through civil partnerships, same-sex couples are opting, officially, to move their loving relationships from the private to the public sphere – and asking for the support of friends and family to make them work. They are embracing both the privilege of that, and the discipline. Christians should be rejoicing.

Alison Webster is Social Responsibility Adviser to the Diocese of Oxford