It’s only one small step to marriage equality

Published on 26/08/2012 00:00

JACKIE Kemp (Insight, 19 ­August) writes several column inches about how the law on marriage has been completely overhauled over the centuries, but then says that allowing same-sex couples to marry would be too big a change. But it is in reality a much smaller step. Unlike, for example, the big changes to divorce law in 2006, introducing same-sex marriage won’t change the law for other marriages at all. It will have zero effect on existing or future mixed-sex marriages.

Nor, as Jackie Kemp claims, is it particularly difficult to draft the law. Civil partnership required 430 pages of legislation: a major task undertaken for one reason only – to deny same-sex couples access to real marriage by creating a separate, segregated system. In contrast, opening marriage to same-sex couples will be a much simpler bill. So much so that, if the Scottish Government were not writing the bill, the Equality Network would be preparing a draft ourselves.

Why do this? Because a country that denies a minority access to the institutions that everyone else enjoys is perpetuating discrimination. Creating a simulacrum of the institution and segregating the disadvantaged minority into that instead is not the answer.

Enforced segregation of a minority entrenches discrimination, as much for sexual orientation as for better known cases of racial segregation.

The same choices should be available to all.

Tim Hopkins, Equality Network, Edinburgh