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From the Tatler account (which was partly illustrated, I am embarrassed to say, by photographs of the gay couple lying naked together on a four-poster bed flanked by portraits of Princess Diana’s ancestors), you could have been forgiven for believing that gay marriage was already an established British institution. ‘The American couple came to Northamptonshire to tie the knot,’ it said, ‘because same-sex marriage is illegal in every US state except Massachusetts [that was then]. They felt it was an important political statement to unite legally and also to have the ability and rights as two men to proclaim their desire to live and love together under the protection of the law.’ Presumably, in fact, they weren’t so much ‘married’ as united in a ‘civil partnership’, though they had a priest and a rabbi in attendance to bless their union. The fact that the civil partnerships introduced in England in 2005 for same-sex couples are now often referred to as ‘weddings’ or ‘marriages’ tends to muddle things a bit.
Last year I actually attended a posh gay wedding, on this occasion at Blenheim Palace. The ‘grooms’ were again Americans, this time from New Orleans, whence came most of the guests, and a friend from that wonderful city asked me to come along with her. Legal or not, this ceremony could not have been called anything but a ‘marriage’, and a Christian marriage at that. The Orangery at Blenheim had been furnished to feel like a church, with rows of seats each side of a central aisle, at the end of which officiated an ordained Anglican priest in a surplice (an Englishwoman, as it turned out, but one who was vicar of an important, gay-friendly Episcopalian church in San Francisco). The couple was dressed in identical white suits; and given that the marriage service had been conducted throughout according to the Book of Common Prayer (the only exception, so far as I could tell, being the omission of the preamble about marriage being for the purpose of procreation), I wondered what the vicar would say when she got to the point of declaiming: ‘I pronounce you…’ She could not, of course, say ‘man and wife’, so what she actually said — and it sounded awfully lame — was ‘married’.
I have read the government’s consultation document on how to implement its decision to allow gay couples to marry (the decision itself being apparently unchallengeable), and it still wouldn’t allow this kind of wedding in future. On the contrary, it would explicitly prohibit it. The government may say it is out of respect for religious conviction that it won’t oblige religious organisations to marry same-sex couples, but it also won’t allow them the freedom to change their beliefs if they so decide; for it will remain illegal for any church to conduct a gay marriage even if it later decides it wants to. Similarly, if a person who has been married in church subsequently undergoes a legally recognised sex change, and thus becomes part of a same-sex couple, the government will insist that he or she has the right to remain married, whatever the Church’s views on the matter. It can hardly claim not to be interfering with the rights of religious organisations.
Apart from that, there are all sorts of other tricky problems that are raised in the consultation document: for example, what happens to courtesy titles in gay marriages? (Might Sir Elton John’s partner, David Furnish, become Lady John?) And in divorce cases, how are the courts to define what constitutes same-sex non-consummation and same-sex adultery? Even the principle of equal rights for gays and heterosexuals is compromised by the proposal that gays should be allowed two alternative forms of union — marriage or civil partnership — and heterosexuals only one. Seldom has the pursuit of equality been so fraught with difficulty.
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