Gay marriage

[meditrina]

Cameron has just pledged support - consultation beginning - noting commitment and stability as core Tory values.

So I suppose likely to happen now.

What would this mean for civil partnerships?

Yes.

Only drunk people get a pain in their hole listening to people who expect everyone else to arrange the legal system around their sensitivity to certain words.

"I'm a registrar and I can categorically say that there can be no religious content"

Apologies and well corrected.

In which case the differences between Civil Partnership and Marriage became insultingly even slimmer.

"Because I don't want to 'be married' and I don't want to be a 'spouse'."

But if the pretty much every single aspect of being in a civil partnership is the same as being in a marriage then that's all that it boils down to, just words.

And SheCutOffTheirTails is ruder than I but is making the fundamental point, why do we want to rearrange and overly complexify the legal system just because some people have issues with what something is known as.

Personally I'm keener on taking the word "marriage" back and refusing to let the past dictate to me that I can't be "married" and forcing me to push for the creation of pointlessly duplicate laws.

And where does it end? If people have trouble with the term "civil partnership" do we create yet another duplicate version of the same laws under yet another different name?

If you want "Civil Partnership" to have some different legal consequences to "Marriage" then there's a sense there, but just to duplicate laws over a word doesn't seem at all sensible to me.

No apology needed BadgersPaws. You are right that the differences in legal rights are pretty much in name only. I am not aware of the grounds for divorce/dissolution being different but then that would be because we deal in marriage/civil partnerships in our office!!

No BadgerPaws under the current law a preference for married over single (grand)children in a will is lawful. And if one of them marries someone of another race you can then make a new will excluding that one and it will be upheld in court. In principle you can leave your money as you like.

Before 1970 a gift to "my (grand)children" or "the children of X" did not include what were then called illegitimate children. When the law was changed existing wills were not affected. It would have been wrong to make wills already made mean something other than what they had meant when they were made, and the same applies here.

It is only temporary; there can now be very few wills made before 1970 which have not either been changed or carried out by the testator having died.

Just wondering - those who say that religions are free to choose whether or not to perform a religious service, how would this apply to the Church of England where (as I understand it) everyone is legally entitled to hold their first wedding in their Parish church?

There are details in the current Marriage Act which allow the Church of England to limit marriage - the ones I can find on a quick skim mean that CofE don't have to marry people who used to be on the list of "too close relatives" but are now able to have a civil marriage. I think it's to cover people like step-families and in-laws, who the old church laws forbid to marry, but who aren't actually related and haven't lived together like a family (like if you got a stepbrother once you were both already adults)

So, churches already don't actually have to marry everyone who is entitled to a civil first marriage, so it would be fairly easy for them to add another secion about same sex couples.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/12-13-14/76/section/5A