A Gay Union Ruled Not Legal In Britain

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The New York Sun

LONDON — A lesbian couple who were married under Canadian law three years ago failed yesterday to have their union declared valid under the law of England and Wales.

In a ringing endorsement of traditional marriage, the senior family judge also dismissed a claim that English law was now incompatible with the couple’s human rights. They were granted permission to appeal but ordered to pay $46,676 toward the British government’s legal costs.

Sue Wilkinson, 52, and Celia Kitzinger, 49, from North Yorkshire, were married in Vancouver, Canada, in 2003 after living together in England for 13 years.

British Columbia’s law permits same-sex marriages but since the Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force last year, English law has deemed foreign same-sex unions to be civil partnerships.

Giving judgment in the High Court yesterday, the president of the Family Division, Sir Mark Potter, said common law had always recognized marriage as the voluntary union of a man and a woman. Anyone challenging this faced the “insurmountable hurdle” of legislation passed in 1973, which says that a marriage is void if “the parties are not respectively male and female.”

The Human Rights Convention says family life and the right to marry must be respected without discrimination, unless the discrimination has a legitimate aim, is reasonable, and is proportionate. In Mr. Potter’s view, British law satisfied those tests.

If marriage was, by “long-standing definition and acceptance,” a formal relationship between a man and a woman primarily designed for producing and rearing children, “then to accord a same-sex relationship the title and status of marriage would be to fly in the face of the convention as well as to fail to recognize physical reality.

“Parliament has not called partnerships between persons of the same sex ‘marriage,’ not because they are considered inferior to the institution of marriage, but because, as a matter of objective fact and common understanding … they are indeed different.”

In civil partnership legislation, the government had “declined to alter the deep-rooted and almost universal recognition of marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman but without in any way interfering with or failing to recognize the right of same-sex couples to respect for their private or family life.”


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