| US-style campaign against LGBT rights being waged in UK Apr 7th 2012, 08:23 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/cono...b_1404935.html Quote:
The planned introduction of same-sex civil marriage to the UK was considered such a trivial extension of current 'civil partnership' legislation, such a clear and just moral claim, that it could be introduced by a Conservative-led coalition government to applause from the great majority of Conservative MPs.
The proposals received but a smattering of media attention, and a polite welcome from LGBT groups. 'Separate but equal' legislation would be a thing of the past. The final, uncontroversial baby-step toward equality was underway.
But since February this year, a well-oiled PR campaign against the proposals has been busy giving the false impression of a public backlash to the proposals...
...The Coalition for Marriage (C4M) is a network of evangelical Christian groups in the UK (the kind often described as "US-style", not without reason). The exact composition of this coalition is not advertised on their website. However a bit of digging unearths a few quite extreme organisations (more extreme than any mainstream UK church, anyway).
One of C4M's members is the Christian Institute, a group who are almost single-handedly responsible for a PR campaign spanning several years in which a handful of employment tribunals against Christians (usually demanding privileges or refusing to treat gay people respectfully) are endlessly recycled and cross-referenced into a media-friendly narrative about "Christian persecution". Another of their members is the fundamentalist group Christian Medical Fellowship, which campaigns against women's choice over abortion rights, and welcomes good Christian doctors as long as they believe "The Bible, as originally given, is the inspired and infallible Word of God."
The Coalition for Marriage (ironically so called, given their mission is to fight marriage for some people) has conducted a two-faced campaign of misdirection, unrepresentative of public opinion while claiming to be so. They say they want a national debate. What they're actually offering is a US-style PR campaign against equality for LGBT people...
...C4M says that equal marriage is about a minority 'redefining' marriage for everyone. They use this word 'redefine' over and over again, like a mantra. And it's obtuse. There will be absolutely zero change to the way a man and a woman would get married in a registry office, or in a church. The act of marriage itself will be the same. We will simply have a few new kinds of couple being included and being equal.
Changing the exact applicability of a word does not fundamentally redefine it.
We don't want to change marriage, we want to be part of it.
The anti-equality campaign also insists that government has no mandate to open up marriage to include sexual minorities. Given C4M's very religious motivations, and the fact that religious marriages made up no more than 30% of all marriages back in 2009, we would say that C4M are the ones who have no mandate to presume to speak for the country. With 70% of marriages in the UK being without religion at all, and with even religious marriages needing to be recognised by the state, the government not only has every right, but has an obligation to open up marriage and end discriminatory gender restrictions...
...C4M claim they're a grassroots organisation. They are not. That would mean starting with ordinary people. How is an organisation that was launched by a former Archbishop of Canterbury, with a petition pre-signed by bishops and Anglican Lords and right-wing MPs, and a campaign with PR support from well-oiled, unrepresentative fundamentalist groups ever a 'grassroots' campaign?
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