Articles - Self Help Legal Room
[b]Whilst the fight for equal rights continues for gay people in the USA, New Zealanders’ seem at ease with Civil Unions for same-sex couples.[/b]
| Gay, Straight, Human Rights, Equality, marriage and Civil Unions, what’s the difference? |
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Author: Divorce Anthropologist | Subject: Self Help Legal Room |
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Created On: 2008-05-19 | Last Edited On: 2008-05-19 |
Does the argument for equal rights become unimportant once won?
A divided California Supreme Court has overruled ‘Proposition 22’ which defines marriage as the ‘union of husband and wife’. This narrow majority ruled that gay and straight couples should have same rights to marriage and that the civil union as an alternative for same-sex couples amounted to a violation of the states equal protection clause. California joins Massachusetts as the only other U.S. court to hold that marriage constitutes discrimination in the US. In other words, California and Massachusetts now support same sex marriage.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled the same in 2003. Here the Goodridge decision found no rational relation between marriage and procreation and this remains a notable minority in American law. Nine other states have ruled in the past ten years that the basis of marriage is "responsible procreation". So it upheld that it is not discriminatory to treat same sex unions differently. This is even more interesting when we see that in two states (Vermont and New Jersey) where courts have mandated equal benefits for same - sex couples, they still reject the notion that marriage laws constitute sex discrimination.
(Full text ruling here)
Sixty two percent of Californians who voted for marriage as the union of husband and wife, it would seem are now classed as bigots. “But thanks to the 1.1 million Californians who signed petitions to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot this November, activist judges will not have the last word in California, California voters will," said Maggie Gallagher, President of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (www.marriagedebate.com). "Most Americans understand that marriage is not bigotry. It is common sense -- unions of husband and wife have a unique status in law and culture because they really are different from other kinds of unions including in this way: they are uniquely necessary because they are the unions that both make new life and connect those children to their own mother and father," notes Gallagher.
But whilst New Zealanders' have had the option to enter into Civil Unions since 26 April 2005 there has been an unexpected result in that there are more opposite-sex couples entering into Civil Unions than same-sex couples. Same-sex couples are not flocking as expected to tie the Civil Union knot. In 2007 the NZ Statistics department reports there were 316 resident civil unions registered in 2007, of which 80 percent were same-sex unions.
As a new form of legal relationship couples of the same sex or by couples of different sexes may enter into a civil union or if already married same sex couples can transfer their relationship to a civil union. So why haven’t gay couples raced to get hitched under the Civil Union option?
Dr Hendrickson of Massey University from his research of the gay community expected that the actual uptake of civil unions would be much higher. He states that the introduction of the Civil Union may simply have reduced the demand for same sex marriage simply because it is now legally available.
Perhaps it’s a human condition to view the ‘grass as greener’ when things are seemingly unavailable to us. This may be a good example of the grass losing its appeal once the fence has been knocked down. After fighting so hard to introduce the Civil Union to NZ it would seem that it was a battle for the right to enter a ‘marriage like’ Civil Union, but not about the reality of doing so. Will the fight to enter into marriage instead of civil union be met with the same drop in enthusiasm once the right is won?
Another possible interpretation of the general decline in Civil Unions could be that it echoes the general decline and dissolution of marriage and de facto relationships. It may have more to do with the trends to shorter term relationships generally. As the effects of globalization increase, populations become more transient, people more self oriented and family more fragmented. Work, survival and maintaining healthy long term relationships become harder for everyone regardless of your sexual preferences.
Divorce-Anthropologist 2008 |
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