British gay activists urge both marriage for same-sex couples and civil partnerships for different-sex couples

Gay activists in Britain are urging William and Kate to announce their support for marriage for same-sex couples. But at the same time they are advocating access to civil partnership for different-sex couples. At the moment, only same-sex couples can enter civil partnerships. Truncated news coverage has described the marriage equality plea without noting that advocates also back different-sex civil partnerships.

Although recent civil union legislation in Illinois and Hawaii both allow access for different-sex partners, Delaware's bill, which awaits the governor's signature, extends civil union status to same-sex couples only. Newspaper coverage noted than an effort to add different-sex couples was seen as an attempt to "undermine" the bill. That's a way of thinking that I do not follow. What civil union for different-sex couples undermines is the preservation of marriage as the one and only way straight people can announce their commitment. We are more likely to get to a greater recognition of the many ways that people form relationships that matter if we knock marriage off its pedestal. Given straight people options other than marriage is one step in that direction.

Is changing the name of the state-sanctioned relationship for couples from "marriage" to "civil partnership" the same as abolishing marriage?

After many years of advocating that marriage should be abolished as a legal institution and left entirely to religion, I changed my mind at some point in the process of writing Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage. I heard so many gay men and lesbians talk about the importance of marriage to their personal happiness and sense of well-being that I decided (with uncharacteristic humility) that I was no longer willing to advocate denying so many people something that mattered so much to them.

I did –and do-- urge that the legal term for all state-sanctioned intimate partnerships be changed from “marriage” to “civil partnership.” I've blogged about it here. While the official term on all the state forms would be “civil partnership,” I fully expect most people to refer to themselves as married, and that doesn’t trouble me.

Well, earlier this week I delivered the Roger S. Aaron Lecture at Dartmouth College. In the audience was Beth Robinson, the attorney most responsible more than a decade of judicial and legislative efforts that brought us civil unions and now marriage for same-sex couples in Vermont. Beth considered my call to rename the legal status of couples no different from a position abolishing marriage.

I have assumed that what couples want is the blessing of the state, the ceremony that goes with that, and a stature equal to that afforded different-sex couples. As long as the name for that is "marriage," then same-sex couples should have that name also. But it never occurred to me that keeping a distinct legal status for couples, but renaming that status for all couples to reflect the modern values of partnership, would appear to anyone as indistinguishable from the abolition of marriage.

I'm curious what others think.