Yay California!

[redbird]

The California Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry under the state constitution. 4-3, but that's good enough (one of the dissenters basically said she's in favor of marriage equality but doesn't think the state constitution guarantees it).

Also points to the BBC, for the headline "California lifts gay marriage ban," with the pleasant suggestion that allowing same-sex marriage is not only the right thing to do, but the normal thing, with the rule against it having been the anomaly. (The UK offers same-sex civil partnerships, not called marriage, but I'm not sure precisely what the differences are.)

My mixed-sex marriage is in no danger from this ruling, of course: my beloved cattitude and I are staying together because we want to, not in order to distinguish our heterosexual relationship from homosexual ones.

[That makes two US states that will perform same-sex marriages, I think three that have "civil unions," and at least one (New York) that does not perform same-sex marriages but recognizes such marriages legally entered into elsewhere, including outside the U.S.]

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Are you British? This is completely wrong -- see, for example, the marriages page on the Register Office website (http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/marriages/index.asp). So, if you get married in a register office, you still get a marriage certificate, your marriage is registered in a registry of marriages, and it is referred to legally as a marriage.

To answer redbird's original question, UK civil partnerships are available only to same sex couples and are designed to have the identical feature set to marriages. The only real difference is the name.

One slight exception to the general rule above: as they discovered with the Prince of Wales, slightly different rules apply to the Royal Family.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

I'm with bohemiancoast. A civil partnership is a new invention that only same sex couples can have. A different sex couple get married in a register office.

However it's legally identical to marriages - and most of the people I know who have had one called them selves 'married' in a very deliberate manner.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I'd heard the term 'civil partnership' quite often back in the 80s-90s, by people who'd been married in non-religious cerimonies. That there's legislation now explicitly saying same sex couples have the right to civil partnership doesn't make it exclusive to same sex couples.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Well - what people call them is there choice. As I say most of the same sex couples I know call there civil partnership a marriage.

However legally speaking - in the UK - a marriage is between different sexes and a civil partnership is between same sex couples. And legally there equivialant but they have different names.....

[redbird]

I note here that I have several friends who refer to same-sex partners as "wife" or "husband" despite living in jurisdictions that did not give them any recognition of those relationships, as marriages or civil partnerships. And more than one in long-term poly situations who refer to more than one person as "wife" and "husband." At least one of these people is legally married to neither her husband nor her wife, and her using those terms won't make them her legal next of kin.

(I mostly use "partner" for all three of mine, irrespective of gender or the presence/absence of legal marriage.)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Members of the Royal Family aren't allowed to enter into civil partnerships?

-Nameseeker

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

The Royal Family were not included in the provisions for register office weddings. And they have to be C of E, so in practice their only option was to marry in C of E churches....

...so, when Charles wanted to marry Camilla, he couldn't marry in a register office, but he couldn't marry in church, because she was divorced so the church wouldn't marry them. So the Lord Chancellor argued that that piece of law was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (specifically the right to marry and the right to family life) and the Registrar General agreed. Report here (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4329005.stm).

In practice, I think that approach, and decision, would also apply if a member of the Royal Family wanted to enter into a civil partnership; I think these days, they would be allowed to, and almost nobody would turn a hair. If that member of the Royal Family were the heir to the throne, though? Perhaps not.

[redbird]

I suspect that if the heir to the throne wanted a civil partnership, some people would worry, aloud, about who would inherit after him/her. Even if there were siblings, cousins, et cetera: it's not as though there's a shortage of Protestant descendants of Sophia of Hanover. (This speculation assumes a relatively young, childless heir, not someone in Charles's situation.)