My Lords, I have not spoken before in this debate; it has taken an exercise of will power, but I have been conscious that time is an issue, and that is true for many of my colleagues on these Benches. I moved the first civil partnership motion at my party’s conference in 2001, having turned to my noble friend Lord Lester for legal advice. I am happy and honoured that that process played a role in bringing us to the incredibly important civil rights legislation that we have in front of us today. I did so motivated by close family and friends who are bisexual, gay and straight but who believe that these changes are extremely important.
What drove me to speak today on the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, were the comments of the mother of a good lesbian friend who said to me, “Why is it so important to those people”—she means the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and others, and she means no disrespect—“to mark out my daughter as different and to mark out her relationships as different?”. There are many differences, and others have described them. Every marriage is different and many of us fall into a variety of different categories. However, there are those we choose to mark out, and it is a choice—there is nothing inevitable about marking out a difference. That choice that says something about the values of the society of which we are a part and something about ourselves. I have struggled today to understand why creating and reinforcing that sense of us and other is so important, and it seems to me to lie behind those amendments.
I promised that I would be brief. I spent some years, as noble Lords will know, in the United States, so perhaps I come to some of these issues of civil rights with a slightly different perspective. I am conscious of the dissenting view of Justice John Marshall Harlan in 1896 in Plessy v Ferguson. It was that Supreme Court ruling that created the basis for separate and equal. I thought I would read noble Lords one of his sentences, slightly paraphrasing. He said, “The thin disguise of
equal”, and have we not heard today that these changes still permit equal? However, he said, “The thin disguise of equal will not mislead anyone”, and I believe that the changes proposed today will not mislead anyone. They are not a mechanism for recognising the common institution of marriage, which unites every adult engaging in a committed, loving and public relationship and who chooses to express that through marriage, whether it is with a person of the same sex or a person of the opposite sex. I ask that this House recognises that the thin disguise of equal is not where we should be on this crucial piece of civil rights legislation.
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