My Lords, I apologise to my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern. British Rail prevented me from being here when he opened this debate. However, I have had the advantage of long discussion with him concerning his reasons for putting forward the amendment and I support it.
This is not an easy debate. I am sure that there are many in the House now who sway this way and that. The issues are highly complex and diverse and we have heard some outstanding speeches today. However, I disagree totally with one of the things that my noble friend Lord Fowler said when he put it to the House that if we passed this amendment it would add directly to homophobia in this country. If I was even a little in agreement with him on that, I would not be standing and speaking here. However difficult it is to assess the reactions of the great people of this country to matters such as this, far from increasing homophobia, Amendment 1 could ease the passage and consequences of this profoundly important measure for the millions of our decent, not prejudiced and not homophobic countrymen who currently believe that we may be foisting on them what they would call an untruth—they might call it dishonest or a public relations exercise.
Whether we like it or not, millions of our decent fellow-citizens will agree totally about same-sex couples having the same esteem, love and life-long commitment, and so on, but, as has been said many times, and so one need not elaborate on it, they believe that unions between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are different and that they have profoundly different potential consequences. To say that many opposite-sex couples are disabled, too old or disinclined to procreate is not an answer to the fundamental factual and real difference. That is where, I repeat, millions of our countrymen sit at this time. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, talked about an inferior status, but they do not want to create anything of the sort. Nobody is interested in belittling the commitments made by homosexuals; there are a few, but, I maintain, not many. However, what they do say is, “Why are we pretending that it is exactly the same when it is profoundly different in one particular?” Why not use the word “marriage”, since that is the important thing, and then have the qualification? It is not even as though the qualification is very novel: it is in the Title of the Bill as we sit here. I believe that in time—and I do not think that it will be a long time—people will concentrate on the word “marriage” and the bracketed bit, frankly, will fade into lesser and lesser significance as the public mind progresses.
One might ask, “Why have that wording?” I actually believe—this is the nub of it—that we will ease the passage of this important measure if we put Amendment 1 in the Bill. We will salve the present discontent that so many people feel about the Bill as it stands. That is why I shall vote for Amendment 1.