The Case for Equal Marriage 

My speech to Sheffield Council July 2012

Many same-sex couples wish to marry. They want to do so for the same reasons as their opposite-sex counterparts - to publicly proclaim and celebrate their love and commitment.

These couples would greatly benefit from being able to realise their choice to marry, an intensely personal choice that is widely recognised, at least for heterosexual couples, as a basic human right.

Instead of sending a message that all citizens are to be treated fairly and equally, regardless of their sexual orientation, the message currently being sent by our law is that it is acceptable to exclude lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons from a central social institution and that our relationships are inferior.

The Labour Governments extended to same sex couples many, though not all, of the legal and economic rights and responsibilities available to opposite sex couples. Yet we remain excluded from the institution of marriage itself, a distinction that undermines our human dignity, diminishes our families and discriminates against us in violation of our basic right to equal legal treatment.

No group of British citizens should be systemically excluded from any legal institution, let alone one as central to our society as legal marriage. It must be open to all, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Some day, same-sex couples in Britain will have the legal right to marry. That is inevitable. As with every major human rights advance, from the abolition of slavery to allowing women to vote, future generations will look back and wonder how anyone could have opposed such a basic human right.

The exclusion of same-sex relationships from marriage and the invention of a different word to describe our unions represents gays and lesbians, and our relationships in particular, as deviant and abnormal, and as less worthy than heterosexual unions.

Civil unions can provide some or all of the rights and obligations of civil marriage. I have no objection to civil unions as a supplement to marriage, but as long as we are denied the equal right to marry, alternative regimes do not fix the discrimination.

I urge this Council to send a message to London we want equal rights for all our citizens.