I don't. Rebecca Steinfeld and her new civil partner, Charles Keidan, have got marriage all wrong. Credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
I will admit it. I have a frosty relationship with the local Register Office. It’s not really their fault. But I just don’t trust them. The Home Office has turned them into snitches.
It all goes back to the Immigration Act 2014. Before then, if two of my parishioners wanted to get married in the church, I could carry out the ceremony without having to ask the state for its permission. The only legal preliminary required was that I call out their names on three Sundays before the wedding.
After 2014, if one of the couple is not an EU national, I have to go and inform the Register Office. And then they have to tell the Home Office. At least one of my parishioners was taken from his bed and spent several months in a detention centre — basically a prison — the other side of the country because he was exposed by the Register Office as having overstayed his visa. He is now happily married, thankfully. And all is well. But the couple did have to put their lives on hold for over a year to get there.
Where I am a priest in South London, the practical effect of this nasty law is that darker skinned people have to answer a whole load more questions about where they come from than generally white-skinned Europeans. Hopefully, this disgraceful bit of racism will bite the dust with Brexit.
So, yes. I have issues with the Register Office. I resent having to ask their permission to marry people. But, this isn’t really about the Register Office per se. It’s more a question of the relationship between the Church and the state. And when it comes to my ability as a priest to confer the sacrament of marriage, I recognise the authority of my Bishop, not the secular authority of the Government.
Which brings me to the arrival of mixed-sex civil partnerships, the first of whom were ‘hitched’ — probably not the right word — earlier this week. In many ways, the existence of civil partnerships is something I am not instinctively sympathetic to, because I really do not see very much difference between civil partnerships and civil marriage.
You can already get married at the Register Office in your jeans and without any sort of religious ceremony whatsoever. If you want to, you can make it have all the spiritual atmosphere of the taking out of a mortgage. And the legal differences are negligible. But the proponents of civil partnership are not satisfied with the resoundingly secular civil marriage. They believe the very term ‘marriage’ itself is so imbued with patriarchal assumptions that it is irredeemably sexist and fit only for the scrapheap of history. Indeed, what the more radical wing of what we might call the Civil Partnership Movement now proposes is that the state should get out of the marriage business completely.
See, for example, Against Marriage by Clare Chambers (OUP 2017). I came across this book on the Twitter feed of Rebecca Steinfeld, who, along with her new civil partner, Charles Keidan, was responsible for the successful legal action to make civil partnerships available to opposite sex couples.
The argument is well made and fascinating. Why should the state take a view about the private domestic arrangements between human beings? Why should it add its authority to an institution in which women are ‘given away’ like possessions? And for extreme liberals, the involvement of the state in marriage violates the principle of state neutrality. So marriage should be privatised — the state should be as involved with marriage about as much as it is involved with friendship. So goes the argument.
And here I find myself initially tempted into an unlikely alliance. I want the church to be free from the state; the marriage privatisation movement wants the state to be free from the patriarchy of marriage. It seems we agree.
Except, we really don’t agree. For when I press my irritation with the Register Office to its logical conclusion, I realise that I have been rather naïve. Because, even though many presume that marriage was originally a religious thing, the truth is that marriage has never been the sole preserve of the church – indeed, far from it.
Marriage wasn’t even considered a sacrament until the 12th century. The institution of marriage is in its very DNA a combination of church and state. And the disestablishment of marriage would threaten its very existence. Marriage privitisation is de facto marriage abolition. Marriage has always been a combination of the public and the private, that point at which love and law reach out to each other and form a mutually reinforcing pact. And society is much the richer for it.
Yes, there are parts of the world where this coming together of the public and the private does indeed feel oppressive. In Israel, for example, where my wife is from, secular Jews have to get on a plane to Cyprus in order to get married outside of the auspices of the Rabbinate. There is no state provision for them to be married within their own country. Moreover, in Hebrew, the word for “my husband” is “Baali”, which also means “my owner”. In 1953, David Ben Gurion attempted to rid “Baali” from official documentation, but didn’t succeed. In such circumstances, it is hard not to sympathise with those who want marriage to be distanced from such deeply embedded patriarchal assumptions.
But does the English concept of marriage contain the same resonance? Not any more. In over 25 years as a priest, I have not once used the old fashioned formula of “love, honour and obey” – and the only times I have been asked for it were because the couple wanted a kind of retro liturgy, thinking it more traditional and somehow more proper. And I talked them out of it. Likewise, the idea that the bride is “given away” by her father is now liturgically optional – and when it is used, it is never understood as a transfer of ownership. It is a shocker that Marriage Certificates require the name of the father and not the mother, but even this is now being changed.
Those who have campaigned for mixed-sex civil partnerships have rejected the civil marriage option, not because the two are different in terms of law, but because of the historical resonance of the term marriage. Here, the argument reminds me a little of the whole ‘Rhodes must fall’ debate: it is an argument with the past. And an attempt to rid the present of the influence of the past.
But you don’t get rid of the moral influence of the past by burying the evidence that it once existed. Racism is not eliminated by destroying the reminders that it was once embedded deep in our society. And, likewise, sexism is not eliminated by relegating to the private sphere a word that was once associated with the oppression of women.
In fact, the opposite may be true. Without reminders that we once got it so wrong, we will be all the more likely to repeat the same mistakes. Let’s not pretend that mixed-sex civil partnerships can escape the power imbalances of sexual politics simply because it has done away with the very concept of marriage. Sin, for want of a better word, is much stickier than that.
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SubscribeMinisterial resignations are actually unhelpful. And Ministers meddling in operational issues is also unhelpful. Politicians seem incapable of standing back from the journalist and saying “Ask him. I have laid out the policy – he is delivering it (or not) “.
Is it that they want to appear all powerful (Narcissism ?) .
Or is it that they are untrained to be Ministers ? They should set down the policy, set down the outcomes they expect and let the public servants deliver it. As soon as they meddle they let the public servants off the hook. Never tell a professional how to do his job. Just tell him the outcome you want-and when you want it at what cost. .
So the bonfire of the QANGOs became a 110 billion quid spend on organisations that even the powerful don’t know about or can use.
I have also seen the same hands on approach you describe. It seems to happen too often, elsewhere too.
I do wonder if a Minister for Roads would propose a new ring road and then roll up her sleeves and then start digging it herself.
Now consider how often the probably intelligent person at the call center, declines (without saying it ), to assist you or to even pass you to someone who can. Their bosses want to control and make all the decisions but cannot do it all. And so, too often I find, such interaction unsatisfactory.
It’s as if ‘ you’re not paid to think. ‘ Has become. ‘ you’re not paid to act. ‘
Home working adds more time in the day to do more work at no extra cost. It reduces office costs . It reduces overheads. It saves the commuter money and enables the employer to hire more easily.
It avoids have huge commuting capital infrastructure which is only used twice a day to capacity.
The only real problem comes at the point changing from the old ways to the new ways.
In the mean time we also need to think about pandemic job losses .
Last year we imported 700,000 new immigrants (ONS data to March) was this helpful ? should we reduce it in future ?
Good article with very valid points (even if it is unwittingly London centric!). I think the key difference to a planned levelling up exercise is the speed of change currently occuring. When you put whole city centres out of business in the space of a few months that has a drastic impact on people’s lives & small businesses and their ability to manage that change.
A Classic example is Priti Patel and illegal channel immigrants.
She should have said to the Permanent secretary -“this must be stopped. That is govt policy . Please get it done . If you need laws passing tell me and the govt will do that . But I want stopped within three months.”
But she had to go and stand in front of the cameras making undeliverable promises – and the problem has not been addressed and she now looks very silly . She clearly does not understand how to delegate . Nor does she distinguish between policy setting and operational delivery.
It always made me smile when reading or seeing some Vampire epic with all the people madly running away from the “evil” demon trying to turn them into superhuman, immortal vampires when in fact most of us would line up for the pleasure.
I look forward to how your input shapes how the UK can be better governed. I certainly agree with your proposals in this article. More accountable technocrats and quangos especially. Also I also find it quite extraordinary that Ministers are rarely qualified to manage the departments they are selected to lead. This I think is a deeper problem with the election of MPs who are rarely qualified in anything other than law, journalism or critical theory.
The author is writing from her experience of London but have other big cities also been affected to some extent?
I am sure once he gets round to thinking about it Mr Johnson will be pleased that London has made a contribution to levelling up.
Not sure about his party donors though.
An interesting and informative read. While the instances quoted may be anecdotal, they are examples of what is fast becoming a major scientific endeavour. A glance across the pond will confirm that. Ageing is now considered by an increasing number of scientists as a disease, and diseases as we know are very attractive to the pharmaceuticals. Unravel the biology of ageing and, so long as it can be demonstrated that extending one’s lifespan is not just dependent on lifestyle changes ie there are medications involved, then you can see why pharma sees this as blockbuster territory.
This is going to run and run….
‘They mostly looked carefully past the bottom line, which is that London has enjoyed its pre-eminent position by concentrating the lion’s share of Britain’s ambition and intelligence in its penumbra.’
When one considers that back in the day, it was reckoned that it took 13 people to support 1 frontline combatant during war, I take issue that the vast majority of London workers are as described. Nor that they can as easily afford 10 grand to get there so that they can support those very much fewer but considerably better paid, great and good as mentioned.
I’m no commie but there does need a better understanding that a well trained surgeon is about as much use as the proverbial chocolate tea pot, if there is not an equally well trained scalpel maker. Who is worth more only becomes apparent when one or other is needed in an emergency.
The patient will suffer from the lack of either, won’t they?
I think you are a commie. The level of skill involved in being a surgeon is much higher than the level of skill involve in manufacturing a scalpel. Still in doubt? Then reflect on this. We have mechanised the manufacture of scalpels; we have not done the same for performing an operation. Only a commie would equate being a trained surgeon and holding a scalpel.
Despite being past 50, Boris Johnson doesn’t understand that having sex without contraception may lead to pregnancy. Don’t expect him then to have foreseen that encouraging homeworking would lead to a collapse of commercial property prices. Nor that the internet means that white collar jobs can be exported to Asia in the same way that factory jobs were.
Returning to the office, for people with significant commute times, is a major drop in hourly salary (of course working from home equalled a raise, for which no one complained).
But worse than the lesser hours involved in this activity we call work, ALL the people I know who are “working from home” assure me they are NOT their 7.5 hours a day, most tell me they’re working around 60% of that and taking plenty of holiday time.
This situation is EXTREMELY discriminatory to those of use without the social status to “work from home”. And the fact that our unions have encouraged this laziness has really lowered by respect for my union. My union cares about the at home people, it cares almost nothing for the at work people, outside of telling us to refuse to work if the boss didn’t “make it safe”, which is entirely ridiculous.
I’ve been a union advocate my entire life, but lockdowns and fear mongering might turn me around.