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

[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.)