The Government’s Civil Partnerships Bill, published today, reveals “a deeply flawed and poorly thought-out approach to family policy which undermines the special status of marriage,” according to The Iona Institute.
The Bill gives same-sex couples most of the same rights that currently attach to married couples, including favourable tax treatment, pension rights, the right to maintenance on separation, etc.
Speaking on behalf of the Institute, Dr John Murray said: “The main purpose of family policy is the promotion of the family that is most beneficial from the point of view of the child, and that remains the family based on the marriage between a man and a woman. Family policy is not primarily about the promotion of equality between adults as the Government now seems to believe.”
He said: “The special status of marriage is undermined by effectively raising other forms of the family to a similar level to marriage. The Government is clearly moving from a pro-marriage policy to a pro-family diversity model based on an erroneous view of equality.”
He continued: “The scientific evidence supports the view that children fare best when raised by a loving mother and father who are married. Studies that contradict this point of view are invariably very small and are frequently based on self-selected rather than random samples.”
Dr Murray emphasised: “It is not discrimination to treat different situations in different ways. It makes sense to confer on marriage an enhanced set of rights and benefits because marriage is so advantageous to children. It makes no sense to confer most of these benefits on situations that are significantly different than the marriage between a man and a woman.”
The Iona Institute has previously recommended that same-sex couples be covered by the ‘legal safety-net’ model along the lines the Civil Partnership Bill is providing to others in caring, dependent relationships. This includes the right to apply for maintenance and a property settlement.
Dr Murray also said it was important that religious freedom be given proper protection. He stated: “It is essential that religious freedom considerations are taken into account. In other jurisdictions churches have been successfully sued for not letting their premises be used by same-sex couples celebrating their unions. Christian photographers have been fined for not photographing such ceremonies. Other such examples exist.”
Announcing the publication, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern claimed that the Bill had been carefully framed to balance any potential Constitutional conflict between the special status of marriage and its guarantee of equality.
This balance, he said, was achieved by “maintaining material distinctions between civil partnership and marriage, in particular between the rights attaching to both”.
Meanwhile, Labour’s Brendan Howlin said that, while the Bill was welcome in certain respects, it fell short in its commitment to equality.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) welcomed the Bill as “broadly progressive” calling it “a halfway house to granting genuine equality to same sex couples through full civil marriage”.
Mr Kelly went on to claim that “the onus is on those who, for religious or other reasons, still believe that it is acceptable to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual orientation to explain why their prejudice should be reflected in law”.
Fine Gael also welcomed the Bill which it said, reflected its own long-standing social justice agenda. However, the party’s justice spokesman, Charlie Flanagan, said it was disappointing that Minister Ahern has waited until the dying days of the Dáil session to publish a Bill which required careful analysis.