Civil partnerships are changing, slowly catching up with the Scottish Christian Party.

The Scottish Christian Party (SCP) correctly predicted that civil partnerships were a stepping stone towards redefining marriage to include homosexual partnerships.

The argument for recognising civil partnerships between same-sex couples was that married people had legal and financial advantages denied to homosexual couples. When this stepping stone was used to redefine marriage to include homosexual partnerships, the SCP pointed out the numerous anomalies that would ensue and in due course the Supreme Court ruled that confining civil partnerships to homosexual couples conflicted with a heterosexual couple’s ‘right to a family life’.

However, there is more injustice still to be addressed, but it takes years of legal battles to implement what should be obvious to intelligent people. When will politicians get it right? The BBC did not choose the expensive route of challenging the Cliff Richard decision through legal appeals. Rather, it plans to work through the cheaper and easier method of persuading politicians to change the law to allow journalists to continue to act as they wish.

Similarly, Christians are taking a long time to realise that the cheapest and most effective means to reform the unchristian manners of the nation is to vote for Christian politicians who will make it their business to do so.

Proper civil partnerships

The SCP 2011 Manifesto for the Scottish Parliament election stated:

The Scottish Christian Party believes that the scope of the current Civil
Partnership legislation is inequitable, partial, and thus unfair. It is unfair that two spinster sisters, committed to living together, cannot have the same rights as two women in a civil partnership. We will seek to widen the scope of Civil Partnership to include all people who have committed to live together as a single household. This could include friends, sisters, brothers, and a parent with his or her adult child who chose to make this commitment. The Scottish Christian Party will take the criteria for Civil Partnership out of the bedroom and into the living room – sexuality should play no role because it discriminates against these other partnerships. Civil partnership is not marriage, and we vigorously oppose the campaign to make it so.

CARING FOR SCOTLAND: A New Opportunity To Revitalise Scotland, Scottish Christian Party Manifesto for the Scottish Parliamentary Election, 5th May 2011

It is interesting that the heterosexual couple who campaigned for heterosexual civil partnership, and whose partnership is among the first to be registered today, specifically disclaimed that it was a marriage. They already have two children and they had no wedding nor ceremony, but simply a civil registration. The woman told BBC news today: “We feel thrilled and honoured that we can have opened up the institution of civil partnerships so that everyone [sic] can now form one regardless of whether they are in a same-sex or mixed-sex relationship.”

We await developments to see if ‘everyone’ is true.

The concept of marriage has been undermined by homosexual partnerships and civil partnerships may prove cheaper and easier than traditional marriage. Joining this to the ideological battle against the concept of marriage and one can see that secularism aims to diminish marriage as an outdated institution.

If this is so, why not simply recover marriage for what it has always been intended to be historically, the lifelong loving commitment of a man and woman to each other with the possibility raising children in a stable family relationship? Has redefining marriage been ‘much ado about nothing’, with extensive unintended consequences for children and society? Those who do not respect marriage can use civil partnerships, and, when someone finds the time, money and effort, they will become available to others living together domestically but who cannot marry such as spinster sisters, who deserve to have the same rights as others in our equality-conscious society.