It’s time we had another word for marriage
THERE are many excellent reasons to loathe Frank Sinatra but his popularising of the frightful jingle Love and Marriage is among the most compelling. “Love and marriage, love and marriage/ Go together like a horse and carriage…”
The image doesn’t quite work, does it? Even making due allowance for the paucity of rhymes for “marriage” in English, the only other remotely useable one, as greetings card writers know to their cost, is “disparage”. Hence verse two of Sinatra’s abomination: “Love and marriage, love and marriage/ It’s an institute you can’t disparage…”
Well, you can, you know. Londoners Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, although in a committed long-term relationship, disparage marriage as historically patriarchal and sexist. They would like instead to form a civil partnership which “would reflect their values and give due recognition to the equal nature of their relationship”. But they can’t, because the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 offers civil partnership only to same-sex couples, not to what the law calls “opposite-sex couples”. Sauce for the goose ain’t sauce for the gander.
Yesterday, daftly, the Court of Appeal ruled against Steinfeld and Keidan — upholding the law while admitting the Government should change it.
The 2004 Act has clearly been overtaken by the introduction of same-sex marriage on March 29, 2014 — but the Government’s policy at the moment remains, according to its own lawyer, using inverted commas as if it were a rare technical term, “to wait and see”. That is, to wait and see if the introduction of same-sex marriage will lead to the virtual disappearance of civil partnerships or whether there will be significant numbers who continue to opt for them — and then to decide whether to extend the right to civil partnerships to “mixed-sex couples” (Steinfeld and Keidan’s preferred term) or else just abolish civil partnerships altogether.
Gay rights campaigners such as Peter Tatchell (who chooses the even subtler denomination “different-sex couples”) have fairly supported Steinfeld and Keidan, arguing that we should all be equal before the law.
However, others have scoffed that the pair are being precious, wasting money and time, since civil marriage is available to all and offers substantially the same rights and obligations. It seems to be the very term “marriage”, along with its historical associations, to which they have “deep-rooted and genuine ideological objections”.
First-world problems? But the couple have a point, the judgment conceded. If, “to same-sex couples, the name ‘marriage’ was as important as removing the implication that their relationship was less worthy than that of opposite-sex couples”, then names must be allowed to matter to other couples too. They are more than “labels”.
Quite so, whether you take that point from Plato’s dialogue, Cratylus, or Derek and Clive (“I went to the grocer’s the other day. I said, ‘A pound of Brussels sprouts, please’ and he gave me a packet of three, and I went home and, you know, I boiled them up… luckily they were lubricated, otherwise they’d have been really dreadful” — “If only people would f**ing label things, you’d know where you were”).
That’s why some of us — even those of us otherwise fully supportive of equal rights — still do not admire the term “marriage” being extended to same-sex couples, since the word originally refers to the union of different, mixed or frankly opposed sexes. Could not a new name have been found instead? The point is no more than semantic, perhaps. But then so was the appeal rejected yesterday. So: semantics matter.