Nicky Morgan changes her mind on gay marriage

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/29/nicky-morgan-changes-mind-gay-marriage

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Nicky Morgan, the education secretary and equalities minister, has said she would vote in favour of gay marriage if she was given her chance again.

She said she had voted against gay marriage because the letters she had received from her constituents had been running 10 to 1 against, and she wished more people had lobbied her on the other side.

She was one of 175 MPs who voted against gay marriage at a time when she was not equalities minister, an appointment made when she was made education secretary in the summer.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 she said she would now vote in favour of gay marriage. She said: “I had a lot of constituents who asked me to vote in a particular way and I listened to them and it was an issue of conscience too, but I have certainly learned an awful lot doing this job,” she said on Wednesday morning.

“I think I probably would [vote in favour of gay marriage]. But at the end of the day, as a member of parliament, I’m also here to represent my constituents … I wish that people had come forward earlier to say: ‘Actually, we’d like you to support it.’

“I suppose for some people it was … obvious but actually I think it was something that we needed to discuss and to debate.”

At the time of her decision she told her local paper, the Leicester Mercury, not only that she had been lobbied hard by opponents of gay marriage, but that she also had her own principled objections.

She told the Mercury: “As an issue, this generated more response from my constituency than I have had before. The Loughborough office received more calls, visits and letters on this subject than we have ever seen before.

“On the day of the vote, I had 285 people who had written to me asking me to vote against it and just 24 asking me to vote for it.

“At that point, it was clear to me that people in my constituency wanted me to vote against it. There were also three main reasons of my own that I voted against it.

“First, this is a very big social change. There have been plenty of little changes down the years but what’s never been changed is that the fact that marriage is between a man and a woman.

“I think that was one of the issues people, especially those who asked me to vote against, found hardest to accept and it also tied in with my own Christian faith too.

“I totally support civil partnerships and that same-sex relationships are recognised in law. But marriage, to me, is between a man and a woman.

“The second reason is that people have become a bit cynical about consultations about policy changes at national and local government level. And in this case, I felt the question was not whether the change should be made, but how it should be made and I think we forgot that step of asking if it should be made.

“And the third reason was legal aspects of the bill. For instance, if we have gay marriage, should civil partnerships now also be opened up to heterosexual couples too? Or should we just get rid of civil partnerships altogether?

“Also, if same-sex marriages are to be dissolved, will that be different to heterosexual partnerships ending?”

She added that she had been surprised at the way her vote had generated opposition. She said: “I appreciate that there will be people in my constituency who will be unhappy with how I voted and I wish many of them had contacted me earlier and given me a clearer picture of what people thought.

“A lot of people left it until the day, or the day after the vote, to tell me they supported it.

“But at the end of the day, it was a free vote. I have to think about the views of the majority of my constituents and my own personal views and I think we could have handled the whole thing differently and taken more time to have more of a public debate about it instead of just ploughing on.”