Same-Sex Partnerships

Abstract

As I thought about, and then wrote, this article in the first half of 2003, the press startlingly filled up with commentaries about same-sex partnerships. Partly this was because same-sex relationships became a major issue for the Christian (and especially Anglican) Church. Thus the British newspaper, The Guardian, headlined a story: ‘Blessing for Male Partners Reopens Church’s Wounds on Gays’ (Bates, 2003: 3), whilst a subsidiary headline said ‘Calling on us to resign would mean the church losing a third of its staff’. The ‘us’ are lesbian or gay clergy, and the overall story was about the Anglican communion being wracked by divisions about the recognition and blessing of same-sex unions. The question of gay bishops and their celibacy further inflamed the situation, following the nomination of Canon Jeffrey John (and his subsequent withdrawal) as Bishop of Reading. His ‘active’ homosexual past, even in a long-term committed relationship with another man, was sufficient to deny him preferment (Gledhill 2003; Morgan, 2003). The Church was apparently in danger of splitting apart on an issue that less than a generation earlier would have been regarded as too arcane and irrelevant to be worthy of consideration. But ructions in the Church were only one aspect of a genuine cultural revolution, which left many people unsettled. From being a minority concern little more than a decade ago (in the desire for ‘gay marriage’), today the campaign for the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships in some form has become the dominant claim in the non-heterosexual communities (see Wintermute and Andenaes, 2001; Merin, 2002), as well as of obvious concern to the faith communities whose injunctions helped taboo same-sex activities in the first place. Even in the laggard UK, partly under pressure from Europe and the courts, there were modest changes from the late 1990s, for example in the immigration regulations and on tenancy rights, which recognized same-sex relationships. Several UK cities, including London, Brighton and Leeds, instituted symbolic, though not legally binding, commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples in the early 2000s. Yet more significant changes were signaled in 2002–03. At the end of 2002 the Blair government successfully passed through Parliament new adoption procedures, which fully recognized the rights of lesbian and gay couples (and in fact

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