Is gay marriage the next step?

WHEN the actor Sir Nigel Hawthorne - well-loved for his role in Yes, Minister and Oscar-nominated for The Madness of King George - died in 2001, his partner feared he would lose the home they had shared for 22 years.

On top of his grief, Trevor Bentham also faced an inheritance tax bill which meant he thought he would have to put the house up for sale.

Had they been a married couple, the surviving partner would have had no such problems. As it was, Bentham had no more rights than a flatmate. "In law, you have no status at all, and that's quite cruel to actually have to face," he says.

Now it looks as though all that is to change. The Civil Partnership Bill, unveiled yesterday, will give legal recognition for gay couples for the first time. Although not called gay marriage, the Civil Partnership Registration Scheme bestows many of the legal rights as marriage.

Gay couples will not be entitled to a marriage ceremony, but will be able to sign an official document at a register office, in front of a registrar and two witnesses. Same-sex couples will gain a range of property rights, including inheritance and pension rights, they will be officially recognised as next of kin and will also have parental responsibility for each other's children.

For campaign group Stonewall, the Bill is the near-culmination of a long battle to end the inequality, which has seen gay relationships given no legal status.

"We've been campaigning for this for over ten years, and finally gay couples are going to get recognition for their partnerships," a spokesman says. He says although the Bill does not give equal pension rights to gay couples, on many other issues it matches their ambitions. Gay partners will get equal tenancy rights, which means the death of one partner won't leave the surviving partner homeless, and next of kin status, which will give gay partners the ability to make decisions over hospital care.

THE plans have been criticised for failing to offer similar rights to unmarried heterosexual couples, but Stonewall points out that these couples have the option to get married, an alternative not open to gay couples.

Stonewall insists it is the rights themselves that are important, not whether they come from civil unions or marriages, but gay marriage could be next on the agenda. In June last year, the Canadian province of Ontario ruled that gay and lesbian couples had the right to marry there, and earlier this year gay wedding ceremonies were performed in San Francisco and Massachusetts, before the intervention of the courts and state politicians.

The tide is such that George Bush has announced he will support efforts to introduce a constitutional amendment banning gay couples from getting married, although the President's claims it devalues the institution of marriage sound rather hollow when set against the ease with which Britney Spears was able to marry and divorce within the space of 72 hours.

Over here, many local authorities have introduced same-sex commitment ceremonies, and in January the Church of England's York diocesan synod proposed allowing partnerships in law, other than marriage, between two cohabiting adults. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey said last year that there could be a case for same-sex civil partnerships, as long as they were not called marriage.

AN establishment pillar in the form of The Economist magazine put the case for gay marriage in its February issue, arguing it was a fundamental question of equality, and even the Conservative Party, long a bulwark against gay rights, is coming round. Earlier this week, the party of Section 28 held a "gay summit" to demonstrate their new, friendly image, and leader Michael Howard has indicated he would allow a free vote on the partnerships Bill.

So far, nine other EU countries recognise same-sex relationships, although only two, Belgium and the Netherlands, give them full legal status. But these are dangerous developments, according to fundamentalist Christian and right-wing lobby groups.

"We're entering uncharted waters, and I'm not sure that ever in the history of the world we have had any kind of formalisation of same-sex relationships," says Norman Wells, director of Family and Youth Concern.

He says while he has sympathy for gay couples over inheritance tax, they should not be treated differently to anyone else who lives together but is not married. "I do not see that just because someone is in a sexual relationship, they should receive positive discrimination," he says.

"Under the new proposals, those who have entered into a registered civil partnership will not be liable for inheritance tax on the death of one of the parties, but I don't understand why those benefits are not being extended to bachelor brothers living together, or two spinsters, or a mother and daughter."

Stonewall's response is that the Bill is not about giving gay couples special treatment, but is about treating their relationships with respect and putting them on an equal footing to heterosexual relationships, as far as the law is concerned. While bachelor brothers may have chosen to remain unmarried, gay couples have no option.

But the real fight is to preserve the special nature of marriage, and conferring rights on gay couples puts this at risk. Already an uphill task, as shown by the number of cohabiting heterosexual couples and the failure rate of two marriages in five, the task of selling marriage as an institution is made harder if some of its benefits are available elsewhere.

So for Wells, gay relationships should no more be given legitimacy than polygamous ones, for to recognise their value is a step towards gay marriage. "We seem to be pandering to the gay lobby to an extent that we don't to any other group in society," he says. "We're throwing aside centuries of tradition, where marriage has been seen as something that exists between a man and a women.

'IF we're saying men can marry each other and women can marry each other, what is to stop us saying men can marry two or three women? This is marriage in all but name, and I suspect this is a precursor to calling it marriage."

Yet The Economist, putting its case for gay marriage, argues that rather than being a threat to the institution, the moves towards equality are the opposite. If gay couples want to marry, the magazine suggests, it is because they see marriage as important, and want to take on its obligations and commitments. And if anyone is weakening marriage, it is heterosexuals who have cheated on their partners, divorced or brought up children outside marriage.

If marriage is important for the health of society, then allowing one set of adults to be denied a right that others have, when it would do no harm to anyone if they were allowed to exercise that right, may be the real danger. It is if marriage becomes a jealously guarded preserve of an increasingly dwindling number, that its future comes into doubt.