At Last, Some Good News on the (Non-)Marriage Front

A British couple has won a course case based on the obvious, which is very difficult in the United States:

A heterosexual couple who were denied the right to enter into a civil partnership have won their claim at the UK’s highest court that they have suffered discrimination.

Justices at the supreme court unanimously found in favour of Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan in a decision that will put pressure on the government to change the law.

I have advocated the abolition of civil marriage for a long time.  However, states like to be nosy these days, so if they insist on keeping tabs on relationships, state recognised civil partnerships without civil marriage of any kind are a reasonable alternative.  In some countries (like France) opposite sex civil partnerships are available, but in the Anglophone world civil partnerships have been mostly restricted to same-sex couples.

There are two reasons for this.  The first is that civil partnerships could, in some situations, be issued to people who wouldn’t be married for consanguinity reasons.  The second–and probably the more important one in the current climate–is that widespread civil partnerships would undercut the “value” of civil marriage in general and same-sex civil marriage in particular.  That’s a purely sentimental reason, but it’s a big deal and fuelled much of the war (past and ongoing) over marriage.

The obvious, however, is the obvious; there’s no cogent justification why opposite-sex couples should be denied civil partnerships if same-sex couples can enter into them.  The Brits need to be reminded that, just because La logique, ou l’art de penser (Logic, or the Art of Thinking) was written by the French means that Brexit will let them off the hook.