Updated again Friday morning
The Public Bill Committee meets again on Tuesday and Thursday this week.
Meanwhile, a further tranche of written submissions have been published. Among these:
Supplementary evidence from Dr Augur Pearce
And from the previous tranche, this from Liberty, but also available from the Liberty website, here, and also an earlier version here.
Today the Telegraph reports (no byline) on a submission made by Patricia Morgan, which is available in full on the SPUC website (PDF).
The latest listing of amendments can be read here or as a PDF file.
Hansard record of Tuesday’s hearings:
The committee has now dealt with Clauses 1 to 8. It meets again on Thursday.
Another tranche of written submissions has been published, all listed here.
They include:
SPUC (see item above about Patricia Morgan)
Hansard record of Thursday’s proceedings:
Updated Friday 8 March
The Cutting Edge Consortium is organising a meeting with this title at the House of Commons on Monday 11 March, sponsored by Ben Bradshaw MP.
Please note the location for this meeting has been changed to the Jubilee Room, which is directly off Westminster Hall.
The meeting starts at 6.30 pm.
Further information on this meeting is available here.
Background on CEC here.
11 CommentsUpdated to include links to Thursday debates
On Tuesday the Public Bill Committee resumed its examination of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. It also met on Thursday of this week.
A large number of amendments have now been filed, see the list as of Tuesday morning starting here, or there is a convenient PDF file of them.
Additional amendments were filed during Tuesday, see here, or PDF over here.
Update Amendment list as of Thursday morning, or as a PDF document.
On Tuesday the committee concluded its deliberations on Clause 1, without agreeing any amendments to it. There was however a lot of discussion about the exact position of the Church of England.
To read the full record of the Tuesday debate:
Links for Thursday:
Clause 2 amendments were debated but none were adopted.
Update
A large number of written submissions to the committee have now been published. This page contains links to all of them. Some of them have been linked previously.
Several of the new ones are from names familiar to readers of this website:
Erika Baker
Bishop Alan Wilson
Canon Rosie Harper
And there several other contributions from Church of England clergy but only one other from a bishop: Bishop Frank White.
This one is from the Mothers’ Union.
There is also a submission from the Quakers and another from the Unitarians.
The submission from the Roman Catholic bishops has been linked here earlier, but is now also available on the parliamentary website.
And then there is Professor Julian Rivers.
17 CommentsThe Bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson, reported a couple of weeks ago on the reactions to his recent public statements.
See My Marriage Equality Postbag.
Read it all but I particularly liked this bit:
5 CommentsOne lay comment sticks in my mind. The gentleman pointed out that a positive sense about homosexuality has been building in British society since the 1920’s. The resulting tsunami arrived in the 1990’s in the fields of education, culture media and sport, public life, the law, the military (in which he had been a senior officer), the police. In each of these areas of national life the overwhelming, when it came, was sudden and, surprisingly, almost entirely benign. The Church had parked itself in a siding in the 1990’s, and everyone else, as he put it, was somewhere round Birmingham by now.
The bishops, I was told, had simply taken the easiest way out — try to agree with everyone as much as possible, make generally safe noises about change, be nice to individual gay people whilst constructing fences against their full acceptance, humour reactionaries under a banner of inclusivity, generally treating past certainties as though they still applied as much as possible. As a military man he could say you cannot run any institution, least of all a Church, on niceness, evasion, pusillanimity, cowardice and hypocrisy. That’s one military view, anyway.
The Tablet has published correspondence between the Roman Catholic Bishops Conference and the Government, see Catholic schools will be forced to teach about gay marriage.
The documents are:
Letter from Maria Miller dated 1 February
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales: MEMORANDUM Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill: House of Commons Committee Stage dated 11 February
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales Memorandum Explanatory Note
14 CommentsThe Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales was in correspondence with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Maria Miller, prior to second reading of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. Following a meeting on the 16th January, Maria Miller sent Archbishop Peter Smith a letter dated the 2nd February 2013. This letter was submitted to the Public Bill Committee, along with a memorandum in response, on Monday 11th February. The memorandum and letter constituted the written evidence of CBCEW and have been attached with this document.
The memorandum sets out the possible adverse effects that the Bill will have on the religious freedom of the Catholic Church, Church-related institutions and bodies, and individuals…
Dr Augur Pearce appeared before the scrutiny committee last week, and his written memorandum on behalf of the United Reformed Church has now been published.
Memorandum submitted by the United Reformed Church (MB 05) MARRIAGE (SAME-SEX COUPLES) BILL
His remarks concerning Clause 2 of the bill are particularly interesting.
The transcript of his oral evidence is back here (scroll down, he was one of the last two witnesses in that session).
6 CommentsUpdated Wednesday afternoon
From the EHRC website:
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has analysed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill 2012/13 in light of the requirements of the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998. This analysis concludes that the Bill, which will apply in England and Wales, would be in accordance with provisions within the legislation and would further the rights of individuals to equality before the law, in so far as it will:
The briefing is available here as a .doc file.
Or see the version filed with the Public Bill Committee.
Update
The following additional memorandum from the EHRC has been published by the Public Bill Committee: Memorandum submitted by The Equality and Human Rights Commission (MB 24)
3 Comments…The Commission is issuing this supplementary briefing to assist MPs at committee stage. It draws on a legal opinion obtained from Robin Allen QC, Cloisters, and Jason Coppel, 11 King’s Bench Walk. The full opinion is annexed to this briefing…
From the EHRC website:
[The] Equality and Human Rights Commission has published new guidance today to help employers and employees deal with the expression of religion or belief at work and avoid conflict and costly court cases.
The guidance has been issued on the same day that the Commission has provided a briefing to MPs on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill as it is scrutinised in Parliament. Both publications will help to clarify two complex areas of law that will have a direct impact on people’s lives.
The guidance follows the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgment in four cases about religious rights in the workplace, one of which found that an employee suffered a breach of her right to religious freedom for being told not to wear a cross at work.
However, the fact that this judgment could be overturned on appeal and it could take time for domestic courts to re-interpret existing domestic law, has the potential to cause confusion for employers on how to deal with employees who wish to express their beliefs at work.
The Commission has therefore produced straightforward, expert guidance to clarify the law and how employers can use it to manage and protect religion and belief rights in the workplace.
It includes good practice advice for employers such as how to tell if a religion or belief is genuine, the kinds of religion and belief requests employers will need to consider and how to deal with them…
The guidance document, together with a legal explanation, can be found here.
3 CommentsThere have not been many accounts of the hearings in the media this week, but here are a few:
Ed Thornton Church Times Fittall: gay marriage ‘not on horizon’
John Bingham Telegraph Gay marriage: no opt-out for Christian registrars
David Williamson Wales Online Gay Welsh cleric Jeffrey John gives fierce defence of same-sex marriage
Joseph Patrick McCormick Pink News Dr Jeffrey John: Allowing individual parishes to decide on equal marriage ‘more Christian’
BBC Minister clashes with MP over ‘gold standard’ marriage claim
Mark D’Arcy BBC Trench Warfare (and scroll to the bottom for link to his podcast report)
Isabel Hardman Spectator Exclusive: Tory MPs push government for French-style ‘civil union’ weddings
2 CommentsThe following article appeared last week in The Tablet, and is reproduced here by permission of the editor.
Human rights and faith convictions
CONOR GEARTY
When the tide turned
Recently arguments over same-sex marriage have drowned out other legal cases where respect for religious conscience has prevailed. As debates rage over what constitutes human rights, secular society remains unpersuaded by the Church’s traditionalist stance
The rights and wrongs of their position notwithstanding, church leaders would surely be forgiven for feeling that they are being overwhelmed by the issue of gay rights. It seems to be everywhere, with even a Conservative Prime Minister leading the way on imposing a new definition of marriage in the UK, by incorporating same-sex partners, a move that would have been condemned on all sides as either idiosyncratic or extremist just a few years ago. How did this situation come about? Will it change any time soon? What can the Church do about it?
The first of these questions is the easiest to answer. The shift to a human-rights culture signalled by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 has put down deep roots in Europe, where it has been supported not only by the developing union between an ever greater number of states within the continent but also by the existence of a politico-legal mechanism to ensure the protection of human rights, in the shape of the Council of Europe and its flagship juridical rights champion, the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg. The latter body has been operating now for over 50 years and it would not have survived if it had regarded itself as merely a diviner of the exact intent behind the words used by the drafters of the European Convention on Human Rights – the 1950 document over which it has definitive authority. The terms of that rights instrument are general, as was the intent that lay behind it. So far as the court was concerned it was expand or shrivel, and like most institutions, its judges chose the former option.
This has had an impact across a range of European legal systems. The Scandinavians have found themselves compelled to allow judicial processes against which their social democratic instincts rebelled. The Italians have been repeatedly excoriated for unacceptable delays in their legal system. And recently, of course, the UK has had its collision with Strasbourg over the right of prisoners to vote. Most countries have similar stories to tell.
Then of course there have been the gayrights cases. The Strasbourg court operates by balancing a quasi-democratic sense of what human rights should require in the Europe of today against a desire to give states a degree of leeway, particularly on ethical and moral issues. But the fewer states there are that adopt a punitive moral position, the more likely the court is to take it on. In this way the criminalisation of homosexual acts has been picked off in a series of cases that began in Northern Ireland and went via Ireland to reach other bastions of tradition such as Cyprus. Restrictions on gay people in the military were next to fall, and since then a range of decisions have extended the rights of gay people in relation to succession to tenancies, child custody and same-sex partnerships.
The European Court of Human Rights has not brought about these outcomes in isolation. Indeed some have been the achievement of the indigenous British courts. All of these changes have gone with the grain of European culture’s consistent and now decades-long prioritisation of individual freedom and personal flourishing which, together with the imperative of non-discrimination, have superseded older, more morally prescriptive codes of behaviour. The Churches, however, remain wedded to these traditional ways even though they no longer appear persuasive to the great majority of secular-minded persons (and indeed others within the Churches themselves).
And so to the second question: will things change any time soon? It seems unlikely. After civil partnerships, how can British society be persuaded that marriage must still always be between a man and a woman so far as the state itself is concerned? Mainstream experts in human rights see gay rights as an essential component of what human rights are. This was evident after the minority report following the recent Strasbourg case of the Islington marriage registrar Lillian Ladele (who refused to conduct civil partnerships on the basis of her religiously rooted objection to them). Dissenting from the predominant view that the council’s disciplinary action against Ms Ladele had not breached her convention rights, judges Vucinic and De Gaetano wrote of what they called the “combination of backstabbing by her colleagues and the blinkered political correctness of the Borough of Islington (which clearly favoured ‘gay rights‘ over fundamental human rights)” which had “eventually led to her dismissal”. The borough had, they wrote, “pursued the doctrinaire line, the road of obsessive political correctness”. Writing about these dissenting dicta in the Ladele case, the University College London scholar Ronan McCrea has called them “extremely intemperate and disturbingly worded”. Meanwhile, the Vatican’s UN Human Rights Council representative Archbishop Silvano Tomasi has spoken of “a movement within the international community and the United Nations to insert gay rights in the global human-rights agenda”.
If gay rights are indeed here to stay, what should the Churches do about it? To start with, they should probably stop trying to explain themselves, since in the current climate of what constitutes common sense this seems only to make things worse: Tomasi’s likening of controls on same-sex relations to “forbidding practices like incest, paedophilia, or rape – for the sake of the common good” strikes many religious and non-religious alike as nonsensical. And saying that gay marriage destroys “the essence of the human creature” and that it is a “threat to world peace”, as the Pope has reportedly recently done in various messages and speeches, might well be thought to fall into the same hyperbolic category. But the Church can hardly go on the offensive either. It never occurs to anyone to call for a renewal of the criminalisation of homosexual conduct and a revoking of recent advances in gay rights – this must be because these are clearly now irreversible changes.
In truth, the Church is stuck, loyal to tradition, but a return to basics looks unlikely. If we look past the gay-rights issue, the recent European Court of Human Rights case which involved Ms Ladele (together with the successful applicant Nadia Eweida and two other disappointed litigants) has much of value to say about the importance of religious freedom and the need to protect religious conscience as far as is possible – allowing Ms Eweida to claim victory in her quarrel with British Airways over the wearing of her cross. But these important points about secular society’s sympathy to religious feelings are bound to be lost in the noise generated by arguments over same-sex marriage.
Updated finally on Friday morning
The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill is now being scrutinised by a Public Bill Committee.
Today was the first day of taking evidence, and those appearing included representatives of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church in Wales. The second day will be on Thursday.
A timetable of those appearing this week is at the bottom of this page. The same page lists the amendments filed to date. A PDF copy is also available here.
The evidence sessions can be watched via Parliament TV, at the following locations
Hansard written record of proceedings:
Tuesday’s notice of new amendments is here. The programme of future dates for the committee to meet is here.
The committee has started to publish memoranda submitted in written evidence. Of particular interest may be this memo from Lord Pannick QC.
Follow this link, and scroll down for others.
3 CommentsEarlier in the year, opponents of the government’s plans to introduce same-sex marriage published selective extracts of a legal opinion written by Aidan O’Neill QC. The summary of this document can be found here. The full opinion has not been published as far as I know.
The government has now published two documents (PDF) which rebut these extracts:
The full text of the first document is reproduced below the fold.
10 CommentsEarlier articles on this can be found here, and then here, next here, and also here.
First, there was an article in the Church Times by Mark Hill headlined Strasbourg marks a sea-change in tolerance that is only available to subscribers, but which takes a rather different line to his earlier article at the Guardian website.
The second guest post at the ECHR Blog was written by Hana van Ooijen and is available at Eweida and Others Judgment Part II – The Religion Cases.
Another second post at Strasbourg Observers by Stijn Smet is titled Eweida, Part II: The Margin of Appreciation Defeats and Silences All.
Iyiola Solanke wrote at Eutopia Law about Clarification of the Article 9(2) ECHR qualification? Eweida and Others v the UK.
Ronan McCrea wrote at UK Constitutional Law Group: Ronan McCrea: Strasbourg Judgement in Eweida and Others v United Kingdom.
Julie Maher wrote at Oxford Human Rights Hub Religious Rights in the Balance: Eweida and Others v UK.
James Wilson has written a series of three posts on Eweida and Others v United Kingdom: Introduction, then what the court ruled and finally some comments.
And Andrew Worthley wrote at Ekklesia Law and religion: happy marriage or estranged acquaintances?
1 CommentUpdated again Tuesday morning
The House of Commons committee hearings will commence on 12 February.
The committee is inviting the public to submit written evidence. The closing date is 12 March, but earlier submissions are encouraged.
Amendments are being filed by MPs and updated lists of them will be published regularly. The first set of them is here.
Update 11 February A few more amendments are now here.
Update 12 February Further amendments and a list of witnesses for this week here.
Just before the Second Reading, ResPublica published this “Green Paper” by Roger Scruton and Phillip Blond: Marriage: Union for the future or contract for the present (PDF).
A shorter version of this paper is published at ABC Religion and Ethics under the title Marriage equality or the destruction of difference?
The speech made in the Second Reading debate by Sir Tony Baldry, Second Church Estates Commissioner, can be found here.
David Pocklington has written at Law & Religion UK an article titled Tenuous European links to same-sex marriage, which deals with claims made elsewhere that recognition of same-sex marriages will become a “European requirement”.
The Guardian has a detailed analysis of the Second Reading vote.
38 CommentsUpdated
The House of Commons held its first debate on this bill, known as Second Reading.
The debate in its entirety can be watched here [Debate commences at 12:47:47 on media player], or alternatively over here.
The Hansard record is now available here.
The vote on Second Reading was 400 in favour, 175 against.
According to the Press Association, as reported by the Guardian (and scroll for further details):
126 Conservatives voted for the bill, along with teller Desmond Swayne. 134 Tories voted against the Bill’s second reading, along with two tellers. That means 136 MPs opposed the bill. Another five Conservative MPs voted both for the bill and against it, the tradition way of registering an abstention. (Technically this means you could say 139 Tories voted against the bill, or 141 opposed it, but that would be misleading.) And another 35 Conservative MPs who did not vote.
217 Labour MPs voted in favour of the bill, 22 Labour MPs voted against and 16 did not vote.
44 Lib Dems voted in favour, four voted against and seven did not vote.
The BBC has voting lists here.
Subsequent votes were
Programme Motion 499 in favour, 55 against.
Money Resolution 481 in favour, 34 against.
Carry-over Motion 464 in favour, 38 against.
The House of Commons Library has produced a 63-page briefing for Members, in advance of the Second Reading next Tuesday.
The file is published via this web page, and can be downloaded here (PDF).
0 CommentsThe Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill proposes to make a number of changes to the Equality Act 2010. One of them is in paragraph 41 of Schedule 7 of the Bill (page 52 in the paper version). As the Explanatory Notes say:
Paragraph 41 amends Schedule 9 paragraph 2 (religious requirements relating to sex,
marriage etc, sexual orientation) so that, where employment is for the purposes of an
organised religion, an occupational requirement may allow a restriction that a person
should not be married to someone of the same sex. This means, for example, that a church may require that a priest not be married to a person of the same sex.
The change alters Schedule 9 paragraph 2 in the following manner (added words are in bold face):
20 CommentsThe Church of England has issued this press release: MPs briefed on Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill and the Church of England which links to this briefing document (PDF).
The Church of England’s Parliamentary Office has provided a briefing note to MPs on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill and the Church of England prior to the Second Reading debate in the House of Commons on February 5.
The briefing sets out why the Church of England cannot support the Bill and addresses some of the concerns that have been voiced by MPs about the Bill in relation to the Church of England. These include why specific wording is needed to give the Church of England the same protection as other faith groups and how the devolved legislative powers of the General Synod work.
We have made a webpage version of the briefing note available here.
The summary of the briefing note says:
22 CommentsThe Church of England cannot support the Bill, because of its concern for the uncertain and unforeseen consequences for wider society and the common good when marriage is redefined in gender-neutral terms.
This reshaping and unnecessary politicising of a fundamental social institution, which predates church and state, did not feature in party manifestos, was not included in the last Queen’s Speech and has no mandate from the Government’s own consultation exercise. The legislation has also been prepared at great haste and as a result relies on an unacceptably wide use of secondary legislation.
We do not doubt the Government’s good intentions in seeking to leave each church and faith to reach its own view on same sex marriage and including provisions in the Bill to protect them from discrimination challenges. If the Bill proceeds into law it is essential that the various ‘locks’ in the Bill are preserved as drafted. The Church of England, whose clergy solemnize around a quarter of all marriages in England, has sought no more safeguards in substance than those provided for other Churches and faiths.
The Church of England recognises the evident growth in openness to and understanding of same sex relations in wider society. Within the membership of the Church there are a variety of views about the ethics of such relations, with a new appreciation of the need for and value of faithful and committed lifelong relationships recognised by civil partnerships.
Civil partnerships have proved themselves as an important way to address past inequalities faced by LGBT people and already confer the same rights as marriage. To apply uniformity of treatment to objectively different sorts of relationship – as illustrated by the remaining unanswered questions about consummation and adultery- is an unwise way of promoting LGBT equality.
The continuing uncertainty about teachers, the position of others holding traditional views of marriage working in public service delivery, and the risk of challenges to churches in the European courts despite the protections provided, suggest that if the legislation becomes law it will be the focus for a series of continued legal disputes for years to come.
The Roman Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales has issued, via this page, a Briefing to Members of Parliament on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. (PDF)
Another copy is available from the Catholic Herald as a normal web page over here.
Catholic Voices has its own summary of their arguments at Bishops to MPs: this Bill will radically alter meaning of marriage.
34 CommentsThe Government Equalities Office has published a range of supplementary materials here: these include a FactSheet, a Mythbuster and a Short Guide.
Frank Cranmer at Law & Religion UK has published a very helpful summary of the bill in Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill: the published text.
Adam Wagner at the UK Human Rights Blog has written Equal marriage on the way as Bill published.
The Roman Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have issued this statement opposing the bill.
Maria Miller, the Secretary of State responsible for the bill, appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme Today on Friday morning, and the full interview is available here: Maria Miller: Churches ‘free to choose’ on gay marriage.
Colin Coward has commented at Changing Attitude on the CofE’s official statement in Church of England’s attitude to civil partnerships and same-sex marriage.
Ed Thornton reported for the Church Times that Stevens holds line as Government publishes same-sex marriage Bill.
3 Comments