Daughters excluded from peerage due to gender outraged by trans woman standing for Lords seat

[SerendipityJane]

https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1657651853725761537

The labour government at the time was simply too cowardly to have the conversation that needed to be had. Civil partnerships were, like the GRA, a means of properly addressing equal rights for gay and lesbian people.

Terrible legislation is written in these situations. And the effects of that ripple out in all sorts of ways. As we are all seeing now.

I guess it’s another way that Tony Blair let us down in the early 21st century.

Cowardly or homophobic. I think we can now see how the GRA has paved the way for rank homophobia (and misogyny).

I’m going to guess cowardly, homophobic and with a side order of misogynistic.

We should bear in mind that Stonewall was the go-to organisation for advice on all things LGB and did not support the campaign for "equal marriage". All part of the "Smash heteronormativity!" elite LGB political agenda.

Many MPs and Peers listened to Stonewall rather than the "assimilationists". Eventually, Stonewall was forced to change tack as it became clear that most LGB people felt differently to the politically-motivated elite who were running Stonewall and were seemingly just as worried about the possible financial implications and tax burden.

Stonewall undermines campaign for gay marriage
Peter Tatchell - 21 September 2010

“Every other comparable LGBT organisation in the world is campaigning to end the ban on same-sex marriage, but not Stonewall. It is out of step with the British and global trend towards equal marriage rights,”

The chief executive of LGB lobby group Stonewall, Ben Summerskill, this evening told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrats party conference that the group is not actively campaigning for marriage equality because it would cost a staggering £5 billion to implement. The charity have been stonewalling questions on its exact position on marriage equality for some time.

Last year, Mr Summerskill told PinkNews.co.uk “There are lots of lesbians who actually don’t want marriage”.

After the debate, Mr Summerskill told a PinkNews.co.uk contributor who did not want to be named that there was also the risk that straight, same sex, platonic friends might seek to have civil partnerships in order to make tax savings.

Mr Summerskill reportedly also offered the argument that there is a feminist view that the institute of marriage is fundamentally wrong. He also argued that for as long as people are being murdered in homophobic attacks, it is not the right time to campaign for marriage equality.

Last Friday, Stonewall received an open letter signed by hundreds of people including two MEPs, two MPs and a number of human rights academics calling on them to clarify their position on marriage equality.

Full story:
https://www.petertatchell.net/lgbt_rights/partnerships/stonewall-undermines-campaign-for-gay-marriage/

Opinion: What does Stonewall want if it isn’t gay marriage?
Andrew Reeves - 28 Sept 2010

For those that don’t know, Ben Summerskill the Chief Executive of Stonewall have said that they won’t be “jumped into” making a decision and are consulting widely on the issue – who with remains to be seen as Ben Summerskill told Pink News only on Monday, “Stonewall has never pretended to be a democratic member organisation. We have never said we speak for all lesbian, gay and bisexual people.”

Full story:
https://www.libdemvoice.org/stonewall-gay-marriage-21378.htmlwww.libdemvoice.org/stonewall-gay-marriage-21378.html

Stonewall is split by row about same-sex marriages
Independent - 2 Oct 2010

Stonewall, which has 20,000 supporters and has been at the forefront of Britain's gay-rights movement for more than 20 years, has publicly stated it has no formal position on gay-marriage equality because it is consulting lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people on how to approach the issue.

Mr Summerskill – who led Stonewall's successful campaigns for the repeal of the Section 28 law banning "promoting homosexuality" and the establishment of civil partnerships – told The Independent it was wrong to say that the charity was against gay-marriage equality, and that Stonewall was obliged to take into account a diversity of views among its supporters.

The charity will finish its consultation exercise later this month. He said: "There is a range of views on this subject, from those who very much want gay marriages and for them to be mandatory in churches, to those who reject civil partnerships as 'hetero-normative'. We are determined to achieve as broad a consensus on this as possible and to that end we are consulting our supporters on what issues they want us to prioritise.

Full Story:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/stonewall-is-split-by-row-about-samesex-marriages-2095468.html

Up Against the Stonewall on Equal Marriage
Peter Tatchell - 17 March 2014

Former Stonewall chief Ben Summerskill has made astonishing allegations against the Liberal Democrats, claiming they never sincerely supported same-sex marriage. He suggested they acted with "cynical and opportunistic" motives. This is outrageous. I don't support the Lib Dems, but they backed equal marriage at a time when Summerskill and the gay lobby group, Stonewall, refused to do so.

Full story:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/peter-g-tatchell/stonewall-equal-marriage_b_4979549.html

It's notable that the supposedly-regressive Tories did the right thing that supposedly-progressive Labour failed to do.

I recall Cameron saying back then that he supports same-sex marriage because he is a Conservative, which makes sense because marriage is a institution perceived by small-C conservatives as the foundation of the family and building block of society and all the rest of that stuff, and big-C Conservatives tend to like small-C conservative things.

We should bear in mind that Stonewall was the go-to organisation for advice on all things LGB and did not support the campaign for "equal marriage". All part of the "Smash heteronormativity!" elite LGB political agenda.

That would be the influence of queer theory. Marriage is what "the straights" do, therefore it's automatically bad.

I am cynical about Summerskill's sincerity in using the second-wave feminist argument against marriage to prop up his stance. I don't think he's a feminist and I don't think that he understands the legal and social context of that argument. Two lesbians marrying isn't the same as a woman being railroaded into settling for an unsuitable man to avoid being left on the shelf. Arguments about how the woman becomes the default bangmaid homemaker in a straight pairing don't apply to same-sex couples. For women who stop work to raise children, marriage is the only way that they can safeguard their pensions and share of the family home. The second-wavers were theorising at a time when divorce courts didn't necessarily given women their dues and when not marrying was much more stigmatised than it is now. It was disingenuous to pretend that a social and political theory about 1970's straight women can be applied to same-sex couples.

It's notable that the supposedly-regressive Tories did the right thing that supposedly-progressive Labour failed to do.

I was around and supportive of the Labour campaign on civil partnerships - there is no way on earth they could have introduced gay marriage at the time.

Civil partnerships were an incremental change, yes, but they were the first actual protections gay couples had. Most Labour MPs voted for it, but with a significant back-bench rebellion. The Tories were dead-against, but again with a small minority of their MPs supportive.

At the time, the right-wing press were running front-page stories about Labour being run by a gay-cabal! There was significant public hostility to gay marriage - or even gay rights in general.

Cameron did the right thing, but he was only able to do so because he was building on the changes that Labour started.