http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35436845
I'm going to capture my anger and sadness while it is still very intensely intact. This article depicts a court case in which a straight couple campaigned for their right, in the name of equality, to obtain a civil partnership. In the legislature, civil partnerships are exclusive to same-sex couples.
This couple had the sheer temerity to shout discrimination at their lack of choice between a marriage and partnership. They genuinely and wholeheartedly tried to argue that they, as two heterosexual people, faced discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I can't explain, without a string of words I probably shouldn't include, how inexplicably and invariably vile this all seems to me. A civil partnership may just be the one, singular thing that the gay community are entitled to which their straight counterparts are not. Just this one thing. And yet we have here the wonders of heterosexual privilege playing its part in making people think that they are facing genuine oppression. Genuinely. Why, for the love of God and every metaphysical force, must those in power demand the very few things claimed by those who are not?
A civil partnership was, seemingly, the stepping stone towards achieving legal gay marriage under the constitution. It was on the path towards achieving institutional equality. It allowed those in same-sex relationships to be viewed as legal partners and essentially fulfilled as many elements of being married as possible without actually being a marriage, while still remained impossible. Until the 1980s, being gay was still a crime. A civil partnership represents the unbelievably long struggle for gay rights. It represents all those who were murdered, and those who had to play the life of someone whilst living in fear of being found out. It represents those not allowed to join the armed forces until 2001, those who were arrested for their sexualities and, most importantly, every person that died before they ever got the chance to be married to their loved one in 2014. A civil partnership is rightfully exclusive to same-sex couples.
This isn't a topics I'm even mildly willing to debate or argue on. I'm being openly ignorant to any alternative view right now. I don't care if you disagree. I don't care if you, as a straight person, feel even a glimmer of prejudice at not being entitled to choice. Heterosexual people have had freedom and liberation and acceptance for their whole lifetime and they are not entitled to claim to understand the mental, physical and legal struggles faced by members of the LGBTQ+ community. Not now, not ever. Straight people do not need a symbol of their oppression because they have never, not once, been oppressed. Historically, they have been the oppressor.
How dare those campaigning for the right to a civil partnership do it as a fight against inequality. Inequality is being denied the right to get married, the most long standing, recognised and respected form of partnership for centuries. Inequality is people, in the 20th century, being rooted out in their jobs and fired. Inequality is homophobic bullying in school. Inequality is not having everything and wanting more. I am disgusted and shaken up at the idea that heterosexual people are genuinely under the illusion that they are the ones facing discrimination when it was heterosexual people who denied gay couples the right to marry until only 2 years ago.
***
I have just revisited what I wrote on Friday night, and this all still infuriates me to a ridiculous extent. If the couple had been doing it on the grounds of secularisation, wanting to be legally binded without the religious tie, then I would have taken a different approach. I think it is the fact that it was done in the name of equality that aggravates me most. A civil partnership was a compromise to the legalisation of gay marriage; it was a second best consolation prize.
