The aim of civil union may be to create marital equality for homosexual couples but it is a further abuse of their human dignity, writes Colm Fahy.
The civil union model of legal conjugal rights for same-sex couples has been adopted in some jurisdictions, including Vermont and France, creating access to succession, property, tax, benefit and other personal rights.
However, while the aim of the civil union may be to create marital equality for gay couples and their families, the model is, in fact, a rejection of the principles of liberal democracy and a further abuse of the human dignity and equality rights of gay people.
Civil union is not marriage. Tadhg O'Brien noted (The Irish Times, July 15th, 2003) that the concept leaves "those who oppose equality for LGB [Lesbian, gay and bisexual] couples with their conception of the institution of marriage intact".
The distinction is not accidental. Any change in the status quo where access to marriage is concerned is confronted by the dominance of that largely traditionalist community on the one hand and subservience of the much smaller gay community on the other.
It is discouraging, however, that the limitations this imbalance presupposes is further exacerbated by the apparent acceptance by the gay community itself of the inevitability of an equality of the "different-but-equal" variety. This is apartheid in another form and should be wholly rejected.
Civil unions which purport to accommodate the needs of same- sex couples and simultaneously leave undisturbed the state-sanctioned civil marriage, traditionally available to heterosexual couples, not only institutionalises the second-class status of gay lives but, in this State in particular, bolsters the widely held and misconceived notion that the formalities of church and state marriage are identical moral processes and, further, that the religious restrictions on marriage within the private institutions somehow extend automatically into the public sphere.
While heterosexual couples that are adherents to particular religious doctrines may have some claim to the respect of the marital ceremony as formalised within the umbrella of their own faith, they cannot have such a claim to the process of civil marriage provided for separately by the state. To admit such a position would be to admit this State is a theocracy and not, as Mary Harney defines it, a liberal multicultural democracy. It would be no relief that a proposed civil union could be offered to opposite-sex couples, as the civil marriage option is already open to them.
Such an extension of civil unions would be nothing short of an appeasement of an anti-equality agenda which believes it has a justifiable legal claim to its discriminatory theories. Civil union's singular and unappealing purpose is the creation of a separate institution to accommodate gay couples because marriage will not be made available to them for objectionable reasons.
Civil union denies that same-sex couples can be an entity equal to married "straight" couples in their capacity to create a stable, loving relationships, valuable to the community at large and exemplary to their own often vulnerable community members.
It denies the familial character of the same-sex household. The gay capacity to, for example, parent, nurture, and value children is broadly rejected in its varied formulation (except in very limited cases such as the Netherlands).
Homosexuals in general remain largely subject to heterosexually-imagined roles that deem gay people unworthy of all that a wholesome marriage has to offer.
The only truly equal characteristic of civil union is the measure in which all those important human elements, of love, intimacy, and familial unity are denied full and complete relevancy to homosexual life with equal resilience.
The traditionalist arguments about how morally damaging gay marriages would be are nonsense. There is ample material, research, evidence, proof, call it what you will, out there demonstrating that gay couples endure as well and as long as any straight ones, indeed longer.
Kids don't grow up queer because they have queer guardians, and if they did that would be fine anyway. One of heterosexuality's most stubborn, self-deluding notions has long been that gay people are likely to corrupt straight people.
The imminent MIT scholar, David Halperin, has cogently shown the utter unsoundness of these presumptions. A heterosexual world that sets itself up as the social norm, in a state of perfect naturalness in which one may take immense social credit for being heterosexual, and yet is so frighteningly unstable as to succumb to what it decries as the simultaneously sick and blameworthy condition of homosexuality at the mere encounter of gay person, is surely a community unworthy of determining who is fit for an institution like marriage.
What is important for kids is that they grow up in control of their minds and their bodies and the evidence of gay guardian success in this regard would leave many straight, married couples scrambling for therapy.
Perhaps these are truths that an Irish electorate remains too bigoted, arrogant and deliberately ignorant to hear.
Or, perhaps there is the possibility it will listen favourably to the sound reasoning of a committed public representative willing to put principle before some fleeting applause achieved for an ill-thought-out attempt at equality.
The Irish institutions and political groups which advocate the civil union model in Ireland as a means to resolving the claim to equal marital status by gay people have a poor understanding of liberalism and equality, and care insufficiently for real equality.
They are either unaware of or afraid to challenge the persistent inherent homophobia and illogical thinking underpinning the presumptions as to how far equality for gays can and should go.
There is a need to redress the appalling wrongs that have been and continue to be visited upon gay people of every generation across this State, from bullying, denial of full expression in education, work, media and employment and the gross denials of basic dignity as human beings in the conduct of their relationships.
One of the ways of addressing this is an honest advocacy of the full extension of civil marriage rights to gay people.
Colm Fahy is a law student