Gays and Marriage: What about the children?

“I suspect that if you were pregnant and uncertain and you knew there was a possibility that your baby could go to Miss Panti and his boyfriend, you would think again about adoption.”

So said Sunday Times columnist Brenda Power on Today FM last July. And you might say that as arguments go, well, it has a certain emotive force.
Brenda was discussing a column she had written about the 2009 LGBTQ Pride march in Dublin, during which Pride participants had dressed in half-complete wedding costumes to highlight perceived deficiencies in the new Civil Partnership Bill. She had been dismissive of the protest, arguing that “marriage is a legal and religious union between a man and a woman.” Which is how a lot of Irish people still seem to see it. But is that an adequate response to what is often a very human dilemma, for example when a married woman realises that she’s gay and forms a same sex relationship?
For the moment, that traditional view will prevail. The new Civil Partnership Bill, due to come into force in June, doesn’t give same-sex couples any rights in relation to children – and in this regard it is unlikely to be altered. According to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), that is its major deficiency. Unsurprisingly, Rory O’Neill (aka Miss Panti) agrees.
However, it does grant marriage-type rights in a number of other areas where same-sex couples are, at present, legally strangers to each other. For instance, same-sex couples can now be treated like married couples when it comes to taxation, succession rights, property rights, and maintenance payments after separation, if one partner was financially dependent on the other. It also gives the right to have a say in your partner’s health if he or she become seriously ill.
For campaigners like O’Neill, these practical provisions are welcome. “A lot of gay couples need solutions now and this will solve a lot of problems,” he says. That said, he objects fiercely to the principle of enacting a special type of union for gay people.
“It’s an insult to me and everyone like me,” he insists. “I pay my taxes and I’m a citizen of this country like everyone else. So the idea that they [straight people] get access to this institution and I’m corralled into this other institution – that sticks in my craw.”
Needless to say, he is not alone in taking this view.

Children
The ICCL – the human rights watchdog – has welcomed the Civil Partnership Bill. However, director Mark Kelly is highly critical of the fact that it’s completely silent on the situation of children. “The law should mirror social reality and the clear social reality in Ireland is there are already very many secure, settled same-sex couples and a lot of them have children,” says the human rights lawyer. “What we are effectively saying, with legislation that doesn’t address that social reality, is that we’re not yet prepared to treat all children in the State equally.”
According to Kelly, the Bill’s major deficiency is that if the biological parent dies, the non-biological parent is given no legal entitlement to care for the children.
Rory O’Neill puts all this a little more bluntly. “Whether people like it or not, gay people have children,” he says. “You can’t stop lesbians getting pregnant. Unless you sterilise them, you’re going to have to deal with that. The best thing is if the children can be adopted by the non-biological partner.”
The new Bill also has implications for straight couples living together. If you’ve been cohabiting for three years (two, if you have children) you’ll be deemed to be in a relationship with certain mutual rights. So, if the relationship ends, a financially dependent ex-partner will be able to make claims on your property, or even demand maintenance payments.
This aspect of the Bill will be retroactive: once the Bill is signed into law, any couple who have been cohabiting for five years will be covered.
Controversially, these are ‘opt out’ provisions. They automatically apply unless you and your partner enter into a specific legal agreement to the contrary. The cohabitation provisions have attracted plenty of criticism and may be modified before the Bill is enacted.

Political support
Much has been made of the Green Party’s role in transferring civil partnership from soapbox speeches to the statute books. However, Kelly believes the “seminal moment” came during the previous government’s term, in a speech by Bertie Ahern in 2006. He argues that due credit should go to Fianna Fáil.
It’s indicative of that speech’s importance (and probably also of the fact that the LGBT community plans to hold Fianna Fáil to it), that the key lines are quoted on the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network’s website homepage. “Sexual orientation cannot, and must not be, the basis of second-class citizenship. Our laws have changed, and will continue to change, to reflect this principle.”
Kelly believes that the Dáil debate on civil partnership has demonstrated strong cross-party support for the idea that it’s only a ‘staging post’ on the road to full equality – and that’s civil marriage.
O’Neill is less optimistic. He says TDs are too busy trying to hang on to their Dáil seats to make a stand against the small but vocal homophobic minority. “I’m a realist and I know that we’re not going to get marriage from this government. They don’t have the balls to stand up to the few people who are organised against gay marriage.”

How The Civil Partnership Bill Will Affect Us
The cohabitation provision will apply automatically to Colm Molloy and his partner. But Colm doesn’t think they’ll go for civil partnership as they believe it formalises discrimination against gay people.
“I think that creating an institution to avoid marriage equality is offensive. When we were invisible and unacknowledged, that was one thing. This is saying, ‘we’re going to legislate for you, but legislate for you to be inferior’. After the Bill was published, the Minister said in a press conference that it’s not a stepping stone towards gay marriage. It’s lip service to progress, but not progress.
“From my point of view and my partner’s point of view, the provisions in the Bill are adequate. We don’t have children and we don’t want to have children and we don’t have a huge amount of property and we’re not planning on dissolving the relationship. So the areas where it’s inferior to marriage don’t affect us. But politically, I definitely wouldn’t consider civil partnership because to put my weight behind it is to approve it.”

Helen O’Donoghue (25) and her boyfriend have been living together for four years. They decided to enter into their own legal cohabitation agreement recently. But, rather than being legislated for, she thinks this is something that couples should be allowed to do voluntarily.
“I suppose, money-wise, it depends on the couple. I know couples who have been living together for years but have separate bank accounts. Whereas we are shared – the bank accounts aren’t joint, but it’s all ‘our money’. We just drew up a cohabitation agreement. In the event that anything happened, we’d split it 50/50.
“I think it should be a choice. Three years isn’t a long time to be going out. When I met my boyfriend I was 19. At 22, I still felt 16 or 17! It’s taking people’s rights away. It’s one thing to get married and make it official. But to impose this on people after three or four years and say, ‘actually, this person – maybe they’ve lost their job and you’ve broken up because of the strain – now you owe them 50% of what you earn’. But it’s not your fault they’ve lost their job. I can’t see how that’s right.”

Bernadette Manning has been with her partner, New Zealander Ann Pendergrast, for 30 years. In January, they entered into a civil union in New Zealand. It will be recognised in Ireland when the new Bill is passed. They hope that Ireland will follow the UK in introducing rights for children of same-sex couples, after civil partnership has been enacted.
“We did it for practical reasons. We decided to because we have two children – Anne has given birth to two children – and we needed more stability, legally.
“We’re both in our mid-50s and thinking about retirement and property and money in a way you don’t when you’re younger. We own a house between us and we wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t be hit for a bucket-load of tax if one of us died. And for our pension scheme, and for next-of-kin stuff – if one of us got ill, that the other one would be able to make decisions about what happened, medically.
“And to enable our kids to inherit more easily. If we were in New Zealand and something happened, the children would be my next of kin in a way they aren’t here at the moment. As you get older, these things become more important.
“We didn’t really expect the civil union to have an emotional impact because we’d been together so long, but it did affect us emotionally. It has to do with our family and friends, in Ireland and in New Zealand, recognising our relationship in a different way. It’s like a public recognition that we’re a family. Whatever the law might say, people we know in Ireland, colleagues, see it as a wedding.
“We don’t want to get married in a church. We’re old-style feminists. It could be argued we’re settling for second best. But marriage is men handing women over to each other. It’s all to do with men and their power. Marriage means nothing to us.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t believe in getting the rights for our children that married people have. But we don’t think marriage is the only way those rights can be secured.”