Recognising non-married couples would dilute the status of marriage

IT would be an exaggeration to say that Fine Gael’s new policy document on civil partnership aims to abolish marriage. But the overstatement would only be slight.

The policy launched last Thursday, if it ever became law, would disestablish marriage as the preferred norm for Irish family life.

FG proposes to allow registered civil partnership for cohabiting heterosexual and homosexual couples. Registered partners would get tax, social welfare and pension benefits as well as succession rights, next of kin, residency and workplace entitlements similar to those currently conferred on married couples.

All this may sound, to use that well-worn term, 'equitable'. It always seems like a good idea to confer rights on people, particularly if those rights are currently enjoyed by others. The need for fairness is widely recognised. The downside, however, is that words like 'fairness' and 'equality' become mantras which prevent people from thinking through the consequences of their policies. Equality, wrongly analysed, could deny legitimate discrimination in favour of structures that are socially beneficial. Or it may discriminate unfairly against other groups. In its latest policy document, Fine Gael has managed to do both.

The Irish Constitution pledges the State "to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded". Fine Gael avoids the use of the word 'marriage' in its new policy. This gets around the constitutional problem and avoids the need to consult people in a referendum.

The first question Fine Gael should have asked was why marriage has special constitutional status. After all, it costs a lot to provide tax, pension and social welfare benefits to couples, and there must be a good reason to burden the taxpayer.

The answer, of course, is children.

Stable relationships are vital for their mental and physical wellbeing. Since we know that cohabitation is more unstable than marriage, and homosexual couples don't reproduce, the constitutional preference for marriage seems right. Other arrangements can be catered for by private contract, with neither incentive nor penalty from the State but with the normal protections covering implied or express contracts.

This approach may make sense to the hard-pressed taxpayer, or those who have an eye on family and child welfare. But not to those who campaign under the banner of 'equality'. These people have very little interest in making value judgements about what works best for children. They start by accepting whatever people do gay couples, cohabiting heterosexual couples, quaint married couples and decide that there should be no distinction between any of them.

Fine Gael has decided to let these people set the agenda. Outlining its reasons for introducing civil partnership, the party cites the Equality Authority and the National Economic and Social Forum, both unelected bodies, with unquestioning approval.

"These bodies have the knowledge and the benefit of research to make these recommendations. They are set up to give the Government the advice it needs. It is time to listen to them."

How supine is that? This, of course, is how cock-ups, crimes and genocides have traditionally been justified "Dr Mengele told me to do it." Don't mind the research that shows marriage is best. The Equality Authority says it's discriminatory.

Faced with the problem of selling Civil Partnership to its more traditionally-minded supporters, Fine Gael chooses hypocrisy. "Fine Gael believes that marriage needs the active support of the State and serious consideration should be given to measures that would strengthen it further," says its policy document. Yet Fine Gael is so serious about marriage that it doesn't mention any such measures in its radical new document. The real agenda is different. The document characterises marriage as "a matter of personal choice and faith". Note that word 'faith'. FG sees marriage as something for church-goers, not as a socially beneficial contract of as much concern to the State as to the Church.

After all, if you want to 'strengthen' marriage, why would you allow heterosexual couples to register a civil partnership which mirrors marriage in almost every respect save the constitutionally-ringfenced area of parenting? Why would you allow these couples the same property, succession and inheritance rights as married people? Should you not encourage them to get married if they want to avail of these benefits?

Let's take a benign view. This policy may tie cohabiting heterosexual couples into more stable arrangements to the benefit of their children. In other words, it's marriage by the back door with the same provisions for dissolution (living apart for four out of the previous five years) applying to both marriage and cohabitation. But where does that leave the constitutional status of marriage as the foundation of family life? And what about the evidence from Britain that fewer than 4% of such couples stay together for 10 years? Or the evidence that cohabiting couples with children are more likely to break up than childless ones? That cohabiting couples accumulate less wealth than married couples?

Perhaps the registration of cohabitations will change these negative patterns. Perhaps. Or maybe couples will fall for the allure of civil partnership and still suffer the instability associated with cohabitation. One thing is for sure. Fine Gael doesn't know.

A LESS benign view is that the proposal on heterosexual partnerships is mere cover for a different agenda to reduce heterosexual couplings to the status of a civil partnership which may also be enjoyed by homosexual couples. Certainly, homosexual rights lobbyists seemed to outnumber the journalists at last Thursday's press conference. And were it not for yours truly and some others, congratulatory speeches would have prevailed over probing questions.

Yet here's a funny thing. Fine Gael's document is silent on the question of whether homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children.

Senator Sheila Terry, the party's equality spokesperson, would not be drawn on it. Since that is the case, what benefit does the tax-payer get from subventing homosexual partnerships through social welfare benefits, pension rights and tax-free inheritances? According to FG, it is about promoting stable relationships. That sounds pretty decent. But what is the State's interest in stable homosexual relationships? Is it about preventing sexual promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases? If so, FG didn't tell us. Neither did the two pages of homosexual rights dogma with which its policy document concludes.

These paragraphs propose that the school curriculum should specifically address homophobic attitudes and prejudice, and there should be a "youth worker" programme to work with "at-risk groups such as lesbian and gay teenagers." What do these have to do with civil partnerships? And why isn't there an acknowledgement that people can be opposed to homosexual behaviour without being hostile to homosexuals? Methinks these pages were not drafted within FG HQ.

The supreme irony in FG's proposals is that, in the name of equality, they now propose something quite discriminatory. One newspaper reported that "a system of domestic partnership would also be made available to brothers and sisters living together to ensure they are not discriminated against."

In fact, that is not the case. As Sheila Terry confirmed under questioning, a brother and sister living together or an uncle and nephew may not avail of civil partnership or of the tax-funded pension and social welfare benefits which Fine Gael is proposing. It seems that you have to be romantically involved before a Fine Gael government would recognise your mutual dependency.

What the Christian Democratic wing of Fine Gael thinks of all this, nobody knows. Not a whisper from John Bruton or Gay Mitchell. I wonder why?