LGBT activists have to set their sights higher than marriage reform

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/29/lgbt-activists-marriage-reform

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On 5 February, the House of Commons will give a first reading to the government's marriage (same-sex couples) bill, introduced last week by culture secretary Maria Miller. The bill will allow same-sex marriage for the first time in the UK; it will offer the opportunity to convert civil partnerships to marriages; it will offer opt-in rights to religious establishments, with the exception of the Church of England; it will also allow transgender people to change their legal gender without dissolving their marriages (a woeful omission from earlier legislation).

Many will applaud the move, and without doubt the right to marry has been high on the priority list of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) campaigners for some time. This bill represents years of hard work by the gay lobby, and if passed as read will be a concrete achievement.

But the government's position has been carefully drawn. As well as refusing to challenge the canon law that prevents the Church of England from opting in, the bill also proposes amending the Equality Act 2010 to remove any opportunity for legal action against religious institutions or individuals for refusing to offer a service. The right of redress against discriminatory religious practice was bitterly disputed at the time of its introduction, implying as it did that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people could expect religious institutions and people to obey secular laws. Its removal is no trivial thing. The government has been careful to ensure that this change in the law does not imply a right to religious marriage as such, but only an opportunity where the will already exists.

Despite this finessing, it's clear that the proposals are likely to alienate rightwing Conservatives even at the heart of the party. Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, denied equating same-sex marriage with incest after a clash with pro-marriage reform protesters at a speaking engagement at the University of London's Royal Holloway campus. Such comparisons are more frequently found among the religious right; the Keep Marriage Special campaign, supported by the former bishop of Rochester, last year produced a leaflet detailing incest and polygamy among the likely consequences of marriage reform, and the complaint has been a staple of US campaigns against marriage reform.

To pre-empt this type of criticism, the equal marriage lobby in the UK has taken a carefully regressive tone in its campaigns, arguing that marriage reform implies no need of changing our existing models of marriage and family. Mike Buonaiuto's advertisement for the Campaign for Equal Marriage showed a solider returning and proposing to his boyfriend amid scenes of flag-waving triumphalism. "All men can be heroes," ran the accompanying text, "all men can be husbands". It seems that same-sex couples must aspire to an unrealistic model of partnership, a form of marriage brand loyalty.

This brand of marriage is not just civil but political. An earlier teaser for the same campaign was explicit: select images from the ad were accompanied by David Cameron's speech to the Conservative party conference in 2011, when he set out the case for marriage reform as an asset to the Conservative narrative of the hardworking family. "I don't support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative," the prime minister insisted. "I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative." This campaign portrays the LGBT communities as homogenous and in full concord with the government's projects at home and abroad. Political collusion, it implies, is the cost of full citizenship for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. What began as a project for profound social change now seems content to seek parity under a system too often still hostile to sexual and gender minorities.

How many of the current generation of young LGBT people will truly benefit from this model of citizenship? LGBT people are, according to a wealth of social research, subject to the worst woes of austerity: we are, variously, more likely to become homeless and to experience mental health difficulty, and subject to domestic abuse in huge numbers. Welfare changes, budget cuts, third sector depletion and the NHS shakeup will leave many in our communities at increasing risk. Any genuinely progressive LGBT activism would challenge the divisive narrative of workers and shirkers, strivers and scroungers, and address the growing social and economic inequalities that leave vulnerable LGBT people prey to poverty, violence and discrimination. An LGBT politics with marriage reform as the pinnacle of its hopes is painfully inadequate to the task at hand.